Sebastian Walby spent the first 11 years of his life on a farm outside the town of Urspringen in Bavaria. His childhood Christmas memories were uniquely German and included celebration of St. Nick’s Day. Like many other children, Sebastian would have put a boot called Nikolaus-Stiefel (Nikolaus boot) outside the front door on the night of 5 December. The tradition holds “St. Nicholas fills the boot with gifts and sweets overnight, and at the same time checks up on the children to see if they were good, polite and helpful [during] the last year. If they were not, they will have a tree branch (Rute) in their boots instead.”1
For “bad” children, Nikolaus elicited fear, as he was accompanied by Knecht Ruprecht (Servant Rupert), also known as Krampus in Bavaria. This disciplinarian would threaten to beat the children for misbehavior. In Switzerland, where he is called Schmutzli, he threatens to put badly behaved children in a sack and take them away to the dark Swabian forest. In other accounts he throws the sack into the river, drowning the naughty children. German parents used this dark-side of the myth to ‘bring up cheek children’ and improve behavior. In truth, any kind of punishment didn’t really occur, and the story simply became a holiday legend.
Today, St Nick’s Day is still celebrated throughout Europe. We can get a peek at Sebastian’s childhood by visiting the snowy hills of southern Germany. Braving fog and snow to visit Bavarian farms in December 2010, a man in St. Nicholas garb leads devilish companions: revelers dressed as Krampus—the mythical Alpine mischief-maker—toting gift baskets and birch switches. The amazing National Geographic photographer Carsten Peters had the good fortune to encounter Nikolaus (as he is known in German) and Krampus in Bavaria, which resulted in this wonderful image.2 Click to enlarge.
1 Saint Nicholas at www.wikipedia.com
2 Saint Nikolaus and Krampus at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/visions-of-earth/visions-earth-2010
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