In what country do they eat KFC fried chicken for Christmas dinner? How would you like to be visited by a hooded horse with a skeletal head on Christmas? And then, no matter how much I don’t like them, we have spiders.
1) Christmas dinner is a bucket of fried chicken with all the side dishes from KFC. This makes up Christmas dinner in Japan. But why fried chicken? Turkey is hard to come by in Japan, and foreign visitors were heard talking about how much they missed having turkey for Christmas. In 1974, KFC ran an ad campaign that promoted fried chicken as a great substitute for turkey. The rest is history.
2) Now for a visit to Wales. It’s Christmas and you’ve settled down with a nice cup of tea and a good book when you hear a knock at your door. You open to find this huge hooded skeletal horse that snaps at you. Yep, that is a thing they do. Anyway, this horse with a skeletal head is known as Mari Lwyd and is supposed to scare away evil. That is good, but I think it can scare away evil just as long as it doesn’t come and visit me.
3) In Munich, Germany, hundreds of people dress up as Krampus and parade through the streets. This is known as the Krampus Run. These parades can now be found all across the Alpine region and also in a few American cities. Personally, I think the Krampus is just as creepy, if not more creepy, than the Mari Lwyd.
The Krampus, otherwise known as the Christmas devil, is the scariest of Santa’s darker companions. The legend of Krampus is so much more frightening than that of Scrooge or the Grinch. The Krampus—half-man and half-beast—has fangs, a huge red tongue, and horns that protrude from his head. And, even scarier, for those of you who have seen the Lord of the Rings movies, he strongly resembles an Orc with horns. His looks alone are enough to scare anyone into behaving.
How does the Krampus punish those who were naughty? A child or an adult, it doesn’t matter which one, is sleeping soundly in bed. This person has been extremely naughty all year long but is convinced that no one knows just how naughty, so this individual is sleeping peacefully and dreaming of all the Christmas presents he will receive. But his bad deeds are known.
Quietly, a half-man, half-beast figure jumps into the room from the shadows. His huge red tongue lolls out of his mouth between his sharp fangs. The sleeping person wakes up just as the Krampus reaches for him. Screams of terror fill the room, but the screams don’t do him any good. The Krampus grabs him, spanks him with his bundle of birch twigs or the whip that he has with him, and throws him into a wooden pail or a sack on his back to take him straight to a place of darkness and eternal torment.
4) On December 7, the Burning of the Devil in Guatemala takes place during the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. An effigy of the devil is burned to rid themselves of the devil and to signify the triumph of good over evil. The day before this, everyone cleans all the rubbish out of their houses and burns it, which sounds a bit like spring cleaning to me. This is the start of the Christmas season.
5) In Norway, all the brooms are hidden on Christmas Eve. Why? Long ago, people believed that witches came out on this day. The brooms are hidden to keep the witches from stealing them and riding away on them.
Although this superstition isn’t taken seriously by people today, many Norwegians still practice this ritual, some even hiding more cleaning tools like mops and dustpans.
6) Caga Tió, a gift-pooping log, is something I’m thankful we don’t associate with Christmas here in America. But in Spain it is a tradition. The “magic log” is brought into the house on December 8 during the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The parents then tell the children they must feed this log and keep it warm. In my mind, you would keep it warm by burning it, but no, the log is covered with a blanket. And what do you feed one?
Anyway, on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, the kids beat the log with sticks and urge it to “poop” out presents, then they leave the room to pray that Caga Tió will bring them gifts. Afterwards, they return to where the gift-pooping log is to find all kinds of presents.
7) I am not fond of spiders at all. I don’t have arachnophobia, but that’s only because there are so many spiders where I live. When your house is surrounded by woods, you learn to deal with these horrid little creatures, especially since none of them have turned out to be Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web. Since I’m allergic to their bites, spiders don’t tend to live long once I see them.
But spiders and spider webs are a part of Christmas in Ukraine. How did this happen? An old folktale tells of a poverty-stricken family—a widow and her children—who couldn’t afford to decorate their tree. Spiders living in the house heard the children crying and decided to decorate their tree for them. They awoke to find a beautifully decorated tree, and when the sun hit the strands of web all over the tree, it turned them to silver and gold. The widow never wanted for anything again because of the wealth the strands of silver and gold brought her.
Today trees are still decorated with fake spider webs to bring good luck and fortune during the next year.
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