Last year and again this year, in what has become an annual Christmas tradition in our household, we watched the Venture Brothers special, A Very Venture Christmas. It hadn't occurred to me that the Krampus actually was Germanic in origin, and that Dr. Orpheus' retelling of the story (and the cartoon depiction of the Krampus itself) was pretty much spot on:
[…] The tradition is primarily an Austrian thing, although it spread erratically around Europe. There are two takes on Krampus, one being a secular humanist approach and the other being a magic tradition angle. If you put any two Austrians in a room, they'll soon get into an fistfight about which interpretation is correct. […]Posted by rv at December 25, 2005 01:11 PM to tv