Krampus: origin

All the elves sang vivaciously the most beautiful carols at the top of their lungs, the hubbub that was generated imbued the workshop with a pleasant cacophony composed of extremely mellifluous sounds, which seemed to cause an even deeper boredom than the one Nilsine had always had every time she faced that scenario that she considered totally hypocritical and conventional.

Since she had use of reason, Nilsine had always found herself entertaining boring ceremonies and carrying out imposed tasks. Imposed by nothing more and nothing less than Santa Claus, a gentleman with a tedious beard as white as a snowflake, but just his presence tended to be irritating enough to enervate her so much.

Under her conception, that sir only exercised a dictatorship in the workshop, and throughout the North Pole. For Nilsine, an elf who certainly was proud of having such a developed intellect and a solid critical thinking for that time, what really happened in the workshop was nothing but a bloody capitalist exploitation exercised over all the elves who spend all their lives working just to make his money.

Nilsine had already tried everything, from progressive and independentist speeches made exclusively to urge other elves to fight for their deserved sovereignty and emancipation as a nation and a as a race, to even failed attempts to take the law into her own hands. And what made her feel the biggest impotence was the fact that she seemed to be the only elf who was actually plenty wide awake and really aware of the sad reality that had surrounded her kind all these years. All the other elves seemed to be so self-absorbed, so consumed by their own vague and empty conceptions, that they even made Nilsine think that they must be programmed or predisposed somehow to just follow the idealized path by Santa.

And then one afternoon on December 18, few days before Christmas Eve, she was just decorating garlands and a few Christmas cookies, but Nilsine's mind simply could not stop plotting her next plan for this Christmas Eve; if the previous ones had failed, it was certainly because of how improvised and impulsive they all were, though what she did have learned from these failed experiences was that it’s strictly necessary to sophisticate her methods. And so it was that in the middle of a discussion with Belladonna, the most candid and naive elf she'd surely ever met, a new gamble was conceived in her mind after an outburst of sincerity from Belladonna.

"You know, Belladonna? I still don’t find the meaning in all these things that we do day and night, we just work so hard from Sunday to Sunday, just to make sure he takes all the credit of all our efforts."

"Elves should always be grateful for what Santa did for us, he gave us a home, he gave us purpose and reason of being, and he gave an order to all things."

"Why can’t you see that it is nothing but a background that he has given us just to keep us subdued?" Nilsine replied somewhat altered.

"These are stories much older than your life itself. Despite of our immortality, unfortunately, we did not have the happiness of living the dawn of our civilization as our ancestors did. I'm afraid we were born too soon, and you think a lot, sometimes I wonder where you’re getting all those absurd ideas..."

"Books," Nilsine thought, which she had found when she was lost in a snowstorm on the borders near the wall of fog, these writings were probably left by the men who lived on those lands before the elves converted it in an area hidden by an impenetrable fog. Nilsine recalled very little of those days, all her memories were diffuse and the little she could remember was just extremely odd, but she had always felt that everything changed since that very moment.

"I think you can never see the world as I perceive it," Nilsine replied with a tone full of discouragement and indifference.

Nilsine wasn’t fully convinced yet, and certainly she could not get used to those so unprovable arguments in these modern times. Like every elf, she knew by heart all the stories that were told of Santa's heroic acts and how he built the pillars of the new refuge for the elves after the disappearance of the first forests, but she just had detected so many incoherencies and nonsense in those stories that in her opinion had so little credibility, such stories seemed so absurd to her that she even thought, in fact, she even claimed against Santa, that they ought to be merely prefabricated stories for the perpetuation of his yoke.

But suddenly Belladonna committed the indiscretion of telling her what she shouldn’t.

"I know that one day you will be that same old elf full of joy and happiness that you used to be before you disappeared in that terrible snowstorm... You know? They made me promise that I would not tell you this, but I really want you to have a good time with us and to share our happiness. This 21st of December, Santa will leave before it was expected, but not without enlivening the biggest feast ever performed in the whole polo. So you are cordially invited!"

Nilsine had always wanted to tear the boundaries of the fog wall, but the millenary magic with which it was erected only allowed Santa's sleigh to cross it. And after those statements, suddenly, Nilsine knew everything she had to do that day.

The night of December 21 was the day that Nilsine chose to start her revolution. Conditions couldn’t be more propitious to flight, as Belladonna had told her, all the elves were waiting for the spirit of Christmas outside the workshop while they tasted the most delicious traditional Christmas dishes of all cultures around the world. Nilsine took advantage of that and moved stealthily on the outskirts of the workshop, until she finally reached Santa's sleigh. The reindeers responded aggressively to her intentions, but Nilsine mounted it anyway and quickly took the reins of the vehicle.

The sleigh flew over the starry firmament, the polar winds were roaring as violently as a pack of hungry wolves. Nilsine only knew that she wanted to tear the limits of that snowy stronghold that had always been her bird cage, and that very night, she would finally be able to materialize her ideal scenario.

Nilsine toured the entire human world, allowing herself to observe every detail with vivid curiosity, but she quickly promptly realized that the system that governed the southerners wasn’t very different from the one that ruled the North Pole. When she thought that nothing could be worse than what she had already witnessed in the North Pole, her eyes witnessed a world consumed by misery, corruption and wars, in every place that she landed, she faced the same reality: a despicable race consumed by selfishness, greed and banal delights made by themselves just to satisfy the gigantic megalomania of their collective.

On the afternoon of December 24, Nilsine landed her sleigh in one of the many houses located in a German urbanization. There she observed from the roof some children who lived in that house, apparently they were writing their letters for Santa and their Mother had prepared some cookies with milk to put on the table by the Christmas tree. Nilsine watched them with vivid curiosity, as if carefully analyzing another side of humanity that until then she was unable to see.

The cat of the family approached the room where the three children were placidly talking and writing, and in a sort of romp, the cat took one of the letters with its jaw and then ran to the door, the cat slid down cat flap while one of the children chased it. The angry child came out the front door of the house, and seeing that the cat had completely ruined his letter to Santa, he simply looked for a chef's knife in the kitchen and then ran to the cat. He chopped all its body off in a fit of fury. That was one of the most gruesome scenes that Nilsine had even been able to visualize, she was certainly perplexed by what happened, she just limited herself to keep watching, the she just looked at the horizon with icy eyes full of disappointment.

At dawning, Nilsine decided to land in the same house. She released the reindeers while landing on the ceiling of the house and then she entered through the fireplace, she wore red garments that she had made herself to play the role of Santa Claus. She fell on the ground in a somewhat painful fall, but she quickly exhorted herself to get up almost to immediacy. She observed the three letters under the tree, and then she read them with remarkable indifference.

She took some gifts from the big bag, which was full of toys that she and her fellows had created for human children. She left two toys under the tree and then went to the corridors of the home. She walked through them as if analyzed each of the rooms with extreme subtlety, until she got exactly where she wanted to go.

She went into the children's room, watched as the three little ones slept peacefully. Nilsine tied and gagged two of them, and left the remaining one for later.

She whispered a mellifluous but frightening sound in the other boy's ear:

"Wake up, little Dieter." The boy got up in terror, but Nilsine was quick enough to close his mouth with one of her hands, grabbed him by the head, then gagged him and tied him to his bed. His brothers watched in terror how Nilsine tortured Dieter, but they were unable to do anything in such a state.

 "I'm afraid you've been a very, very bad child..." Nilsine uttered ironically as she pulled out a chef’s knife. "I suppose you should remember this knife very well, aren’t you?" Nilsine slid the knife through the boy's body while his screams were attenuated by the gag. "I do remember every piece of skin so perfectly well, every scattered viscera, every severed limb... I'm dying to see how you'll react when you reap what yo’ve sown."

Nilsine finally realized one of the scenarios that her mind had imagined since she came to the human world. With the severed head of the child in her hands, she went back to the Christmas tree and placed it under it as if it were a Christmas present, and then she left.

At morning, the parents found the two children bound and gagged in their rooms, but they never imagined the horrendous present that awaited them under their Christmas tree. Since then, many stories were told, different versions of the same satanized figure, the only certain thing is that this was just the beginning of an urban legend by which Nilsine, would be called "Krampus".