Krampus: The Devil of Christmas: Pre-WWI Krampus Postcard Reproductiions

I love all things Christmas. From Peanuts to Tolkien's letters to Victorian images, I love to see the various ways we've celebrated. Krampus is one of the more recent additions, but an enjoyable one. I've known about Krampus since around 2004, and I've found him fascinating. This past year (Christmas 2013), I brought this book to our family gathering for Christmas. It was really amusing and interesting to just about everyone.. The book has a lot of great images and is bound well and printed on quality paper. I expect this book to have a place in my Christmas collection for years to come.

Best pictures post cards this book is solid full of images of all Krampus. If your a fan must have book

Krampus is a wonderful concept that has its origins in early Christmas. The story was to try to keep children to be good during the holiday season or there would be terrible consequences. The book has many images of the Krampus and is a wonderful collection of early postcards. Anyone interested in antique Christmas would like this book. It shows the other side of the holiday and is beautifully shown in the book. We highly recommend it.

Please be aware that this book has about 7 pages of text. The rest of the pages are full-page pictures of Krampuskarten (Krampus greeting cards) from the late 1800s. They are beautiful pictures! But don’t expect this book to give you any in-depth analysis of Krampus.

...or, "Greetings from Krampus"! What a marvelously imaginative fantasy character! Unfortunately, as Americans we have a tendency to bowdlerize, sanitize, and cute-ify everything. Disney polishes all the rough edges off of Grimm's fairy tales, and Clement Moore and Thomas Nast took the greek Saint Nickolaus and turned him into a jolly red-suited fat man called Santa Claus that has nothing left in common with his predecessor except a white beard and a predilection for gift-giving. The folk myth that Europeans had in the 18th and 19th centuries was designed to impress unruly and raucous children with the need to behave themselves. Bad behavior would not only result in no gifts from Saint Nickolaus, but also a visit from his dark servant, the Krampus. The black-furred, horned and cloven-hoofed demon consulted his Book of Sins and was tasked with the responsibility of punishing recalcitrant and unrepentant children. Depending on the seriousness of a child's sins, Krampus would frighten, spank, whip with a birch switch, or in cases of extreme misbehavior, even toss them into a large wooden or wicker basket he carried on his back and cart them off to Hell for punishment. A far more serious consequence than merely receiving a lump of coal in your shoe! The Krampusnacht festival is still held in some places in Europe on the eve of December 5th (December 6th being Saint Nickolaus' Day). When high-quality color printing technology came into existence in the 1890s, the image of the Krampus was playfully celebrated each year in a series of postcards that were extremely popular, and sometimes collected the way kids in America would later collect baseball and other types of trading cards. It's obvious from the images here that they were aimed just as squarely at adults as well, since some of them contain images that are slightly suggestive (and probably far less innocuous in their time than they seem to us today). Somebody (Tim Burton?) really HAS to make a movie based on the legend of the Krampus.

I don't know how, but I had never heard of the Krampus until this year! As a fan of the supernatural and all things spooky, this was an amazing find. This is a fun collection of Krampus drawings over the years that is great as a coffee table book, or (if you're like me) to bust out during Christmas dinner and pass around for everyone else to witness the holiday demon we never knew about. Lots of laughs for those of us with a twisted sense of humor. My favorite picture is the one where Krampus is lifting a screaming child by his ears. 'Tis the season to be jolly!

If I could give this little book 6 stars I would, it's that good! The artwork is so incredibly awesome that after flipping through it I was hungry for MORE KRAMPUS! So of course I bought every book on Krampus ever written and now have an impressive collection on the Fearsome Yule lord! OK, granted not everybody is as obsessive/compulsive as yers trooly, but just hear me out, huh? Buy the book. I mean it. Buy it NOW or I swear the Dark One will show up at your house when you least expect it and he'll do something really unpleasant. Got it? No, get it!

If you are a little over-dosed on sugary angels, glittering snow, sweet improbable children and perfectly functioning families, this comes as a welcome alternative. Full of mischief, satirical takes on people and the holiday, this is evocative of a time and place through the art, and makes it more real in doing so. A little like watching old prewar motion pictures, it is entertaining, and a little dated. I hear stories from older people about Krampus from their childhood and how this collection depicts the fanciful with some basis in their experiences they always were told about, but never really experienced. Good fun.