Episode 53 – Christmas Evil – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 53 Show Notes

Source: Canadian Folklore

This week on MYTH, we’ll settle in front of a roaring fire for a traditional Christmas horror story. You’ll see that Santa is is no real hurry to help out children, that you should definitely believe all local rumors, and that Santa used to have some weird powers. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll get candy and beatings depending on if you’ve been impish or adorable. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 53, “Christmas Evil”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
The holiday season is upon us once again, and that means it’s time for our annual holiday special! If you’re anything like me, you can get a little bit tired of the overdone “tiny child saves Christmas”, so we’re switching it up this year. In the Great White North of Canada, Christmas saves you! It gets very dark in the frozen wilderness in the winter, so don’t be surprised if this fairy tale gets just as dark. You’ve been warned.
Once upon a time, there were two children who lived with their grandmother in a remote place in the forests of Canada. They were twins, a boy named Pierre and a girl named Estelle, and if it weren’t for their clothes, it would be almost impossible to tell them apart. This is where I usually ask rhetorically ‘what happened to the parents’ and then verbally shrug because the story doesn’t bother to tell us, but not this time. No, this time, I can share with you the tragic backstory of these sad twins. In the spring, their father had come down with a fever, and it had quickly spread to their mother as well when she tried to care for her husband. Both died in short order, leaving the twins to fend for themselves.
This they did for a few months until, in the summer, they finally realized that they weren’t going to be able to raise themselves all alone in that empty house. I can only presume that they must have buried their parents themselves as there appears to have been no one anywhere nearby to help out since, with their parents dead, they packed up their meager belongings and set out to find their grandmother’s house in the deep woods. Shockingly, two orphan children setting out into the woods all alone in search of a grandmother they barely knew is not, in fact the story. They made the journey with no difficulty and soon settled down into their new lives with their new caretaker.
Their grandmother was very poor. She had never had much, but it had been enough when she only had herself to take care of. Now, with two new mouths to feed, there never seemed to be enough food to go around. Breaking form again, the grandmother actually loved her grandchildren dearly and treated them very well. She worked as hard as she could to provide for them, and in spite of being poor and without enough food, the children were happy. To help out, Pierre and Estelle would catch fish in the streams, gather berries and fruit from the trees and bushes, and plunder bird’s nests for eggs in the wooded hills. Through the end of the summer, they managed to find ways to make ends meet, and all three were happy.
Of course, summer could not last forever, and soon the autumn came. Before long, they could no longer find fresh fruit, and there were no more eggs in the empty nests (for the birds had all flown south). Even the fish were beyond their reach as the streams slowly froze over. The three grew leaner as the food grew more and more scarce.
The poor grandmother worked even harder trying to provide, but she was old and not as healthy as she used to be, so the extra effort took a toll on her and she fell very ill. For several days, she was too weak to leave her bed. Pierre and Estelle knew enough to know that their grandmother needed real food to get better. They asked her what they could do, and after trying to weakly tell them she was fine, she admitted that she needed something solid to help her heal. “I need meat broth to get me well, and to make that, I need to actually have good meat. I hate to ask, but if I don’t get meat, I can’t make broth, which means I can’t get well, which means I will definitely die, which means you two children will almost certainly starve to death. You need to go out and get us meat so that we can all live through this awful winter.”
The children knew that she was right, and so the next morning, they set out in search of meat to make the broth. Their grandmother’s home was very isolated; no other people lived anywhere nearby and they didn’t know exactly where to go, but for lack of a better option, they set out along the only forest path from the house. The snow lay deep and pure, and it sparkled like jewels in the morning sunlight. Other than their one trip to find their grandmother, they had never really gone far from the house on their own. That first trip had worked out well, so they had every reason to assume that this one would too.
They had lived in the forest for a while, but they hadn’t really had much time to explore, so they were entranced by the incredible sights around them. There a rabbit hopped across the snow barely leaving a trace as it passed, and there a snowbird hovered in the frozen air and twittered a beautiful song, and all of them were looking for food in the frozen landscape, just like the children. The deep green and sparkling white were punctuated here and there with holly berries and mistletoe hanging from the trees.
Pierre was fascinated by the holly berries and mistletoe. He stared at them with a huge smile on his face. “Saint Nicholas will be here soon – look, Estelle, the trees are all dressed up for his arrival!” Estelle smiled back. “I think you’re right, Pierre. It’s almost time for Saint Nicholas to visit.” They both walked a little faster after that, buoyed by the excitement of imagining the coming visit from the magical Saint Nick.”
They walked along like this all morning, and the shadows stretched into the afternoon. They came upon an old man sitting in the door of a small cottage made from spruce boughs set in the pool of shadow from the massive old trees that grew close to the forest path. He was busy working a piece of wood in his hands, whittling away the willow branch into a wooden whistle with his flashing knife and tapping gently on the bark to loosen it and slip it off easily. The children stopped to watch him work, for his hands moved with a grace that they found fascinating. It didn’t hurt that he had a kindly, weather-beaten face set in a thick white mane with eyes that twinkled merrily in the sunlight. They were not afraid of this gentle soul.
The old man glanced up from his work as they approached and smiled. “Hello, children.” “Hey there, old timer! Why ya making willow whistles?” “Why, for Saint Nicholas of course! Did you forget that it’s almost time for his yearly visit? In fact, I think he may already be close by. Every year, when he goes to the homes of the good boys and girls, he leaves whistles and other small toys for them. Where did you think he got all of those toys for leaving at countless homes that he visits all in one night? Magical elves? Don’t be ridiculous. Saint Nick buys local, and I’m his whistle guy, so I need to have a lot ready for him. A lot of kids need whistles.”
Satisfied that this was a sufficient explanation, the old man went back to his whittling. The children didn’t move, hypnotized by the quick, exact movements of his flashing blade. They decided that it must be the best job in the world to make toys for Saint Nick and live in a homey little cottage under the boughs of the old growth forest. The old man glanced up again, noticing that they hadn’t stirred. “You know, you two seem awfully young to be wandering the woods by yourselves. Why are you out here alone?”
Estelle piped up. “Our grandmother is very sick. She needs soup to get better, so we’re off looking for good meat to make it with. Unfortunately, we’re not really sure where to go.” The knife stopped moving. “I’m sorry to hear that. I’d offer you what you need, but I’m a vegetarian. I live off what I can grow, gather, and trade for, so I’m afraid I don’t have any meat to give you. If you go a little ways farther down the road though, there lives a butcher. He’s sure to have meat, but I’m not sure you should ask him. He is a very wicked fellow, and very dangerous. I’ve heard rumors that sometimes, when little children enter his shop, they are never seen ever again. I don’t know if the stories are true, but I don’t like that asshole. It’s honestly part of why I don’t eat meat.”
The children were more than a little terrified by having a grown ass man warning them that the only source of meat anywhere nearby might be a cannibal and pull a Sweeny Todd on them if they went to see him, and I can’t say I blame them. The old man seemed completely sincere, and that’s not an easy thing to hear in the best of times, let alone when you are a small child facing being orphaned and starving to death or being murdered and eaten.
Estelle and Pierre debated going home and abandoning this whole venture. They talked quietly as the old man whittled, unsure what to do. The old man, meanwhile, racked his brain about how to help these children out of their predicament. For some reason, the obvious solution of accompanying them on their perilous journey never occurred to him (or maybe it did, and he just wasn’t willing to brave the potentially cannibalistic butcher with the small children). Instead, he offered each of them a whistle. “What are we supposed to do with this? Whistle at the butcher when he tries to murder us and hopes he’s really scared of high-pitched noises for some reason?” The old man chuckled. “No, no – these are magical whistles. If you blow them, Saint Nickolas will hear it, no matter where you are. I warn you though, these aren’t toys. You must never, ever blow them unless you are in great danger. If he hears them, he’ll know that you’re in terrible danger and will either come himself or will send someone for you. Whatever you do, though, only blow the whistle once. Technically, only Saint Nick is supposed to give these away personally, and only on Christmas Eve, but you two seem like good kids, and your grandma is sick after all, so he’ll probably be cool with it.”
Now, these kids had absolutely no proof whatsoever that these whistles were, in fact, magical, and they were literally watching this completely mundane dude make them, but they were credulous, gullible little kids. You’d think that burying your own parents and then watching your grandma maybe dying and sending you out on what might be a suicide mission to get meat from a butcher who might be a child-murdering cannibal would make someone a little more cynical, but apparently not. Fearless now with the assurance that Santa would rush in to magically help them if they got into trouble, always assuming that trouble gave them enough time to pull out their whistles and blow, they set out towards the evil butcher.
The sun was hanging low in the sky by the time the children set out from the home of the kindly old man in search of the butcher shop (which I cannot stress enough, they are convinced is run by a man who is entirely likely to murder and eat them). As they walked, the absolute insanity of what they were doing began to bubble up through the optimism created by the magical Santa whistles and they began to have serious doubts about this whole endeavor again. It finally occurred to them that the old man might have been lying about the whistles, which led them to wonder if he might actually be a secret friend of this heinous butcher, sending them to their certain dooms with false promises of salvation by magical whistles that were, in reality, just stupid toys. They realized that there was no earthly reason why they had to try this particular evil butcher shop to look for meat and decided to try literally anywhere else instead.
They found a lot of homes and businesses around, but none of them had any meat to spare (or at least, none that they were willing to part with). They were running out of places left to ask when they saw the butcher shop up ahead. The sun was already dropping below the trees, and it would soon be dark, and still they had no meat and no other leads. Estelle and Pierre talked it over amongst themselves. They knew that their grandmother needed her meat broth if she was going to get better (which may or may not be actually true, but I don’t blame the kids for believing what a trusted adult told them). The shop itself didn’t look at all terrible and foreboding. In fact, it looked downright homey and pleasant. Warm buttery light from a cheerful looking fire spilled out of the windows. Sausages and fat plucked birds were hung above massive pumpkins and delicious looking cakes topped with ripe red berries. The children had been wandering all day and, being children, hadn’t thought to bring anything in the way of food and were now ravenous. Their hunger as much as their concern for their grandmother decided the issue. They went inside to get meat for their grandmother and also to get some food for themselves while they warmed their bones.
They weren’t entirely convinced that this butcher shop was all sunshine and puppies though, and they figured it would be prudent to go ahead and blow a blast on their whistles so that Saint Nicholas would know that they were in dread of great harm. They stood in the shadows of the great trees and got ready to blow their whistles together. Pierre gave the signal and blew a long, soft blast on his whistle. Estelle, however, couldn’t quite get her whistle out in time (why they hadn’t pulled them out together first is beyond me). Pierre blew for as long as his tiny lungs could manage to try and give her time, but he ran out of breath before she could.
She finally put the whistle to her lips, but Pierre stopped her. “Damn, sis, don’t blow now! You’re such a girl, always late!” That’s some weird sexist shade Pierre is throwing at his sister, but the old man had in fact warned them to only blow once, so he’s not wrong to stop her. She reacts about as well as I would to his snide shit and blows her own whistle just to spite her brother. Pierre was pissed right the fuck off at his sister, convinced that nothing good could come of this, but there was nothing to be done about it now, so they went into the shop.
The butcher was standing there behind the counter, but not another soul was in there with him. It was eerily silent inside as the two kids walked in. He smiled at them, and seated them by the fire to warm up. He shut the door tight behind them to keep out any drafts and gave them something to eat. They munched happily all fear forgotten. This kindly man clearly wasn’t a child-murdering cannibal, just the victim of vicious rumors. Once they had shoveled meats and sweets into their mouths and driven out most of the chill, they told the butcher what they’d come for. “No problem, kids. I know that meat is pretty scarce in this land right now, but I’ve got plenty.” He gestured to a barrel standing in one corner and a massive hogshead that reached almost to the ceiling. “Both of those are completely full of meat, so you’ll be able to get a nice, choice cut.”
They were half right about him. Cue the ominous musical sting. See, it turns out that the butcher was every bit as murderous and evil as the old man had warned them. He was friends and business partners with a wicked giant who lived in the forest not too far away. As is often the case with wicked giants, he loved to eat little children. His favorite meal though was two kids pickled in brine and eaten together. He ate children whenever he could get them but they were pretty rare in this land as well, so it was hard to get. He was a pretty great hunter, so he was able to kill an impressive number of animals. As a giant, he was also large and strong enough to carry all of it to the butcher once a week. In exchange, he took any children the butcher had managed to obtain in the meantime. The butcher was able to get meat at an incredibly cheap rate when no one else was able to get any at all. So he wasn’t a cannibal, but he was absolutely a child-murderer and pretty much any children who entered his shop never left again. Well, not alive anyway.
The reason the butcher smiled when the two kids walked in was because the giant was due for his weekly visit that evening. They were perfect. He was practically dry-washing his hands at the thought of how much he could charge for the meat he would buy with these children’s lives. They looked plump and delicious, and he knew that the giant would give all of the meat he had for them. He didn’t even have to think about it – he was definitely going to murder these kids and pickle them in the brine barrel.
By now, the children were warmed up and full, so they were ready to go home. They asked the butcher for the meat they’d asked for. “Oh, sure. I’ll go get it for you.” That seemed odd. The kids could see shelves all over this fucking place just full of food – hams and cabbages and strings of onions. “Um, okay. Hey, while you’re at it could we get some onions? It would probably be a nice addition for grandma’s soup.” “Sure, kids, sure. I’ve actually got a couple of different types in a box up there on the highest shelf. I’ll lift you up there and you can pick some out.”
Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed both of them by the coat, between their shoulder blades, and hoisted both of them up to the high shelf simultaneously. They picked out some onions and he brought them down again and held them straight out. They laughed at this feat of strength. The butcher laughed too, then he slammed the two children together viciously, stunning them. Then, he threw them headfirst into the barrel, which contained brine instead of meat, like he’d told the kids. He replaced the lid and left them to pickle for the giant, who would be here soon.
Not long after full dark had fallen, the giant showed up. On his back, he carried a massive load of animal carcasses, most field dressed but not yet butchered. “What cheer for me tonight, butcher, what fortune?” he roared as he entered. The butcher smiled a wicked smile. “Good cheer and fine fortune, friend giant! I have a pair of nice fat children pickling for you right now.”
He took off the lid and showed the giant the motionless bodies of the two kids who, by now, had drowned in the brine and were super fucking dead. Hope you weren’t too attached to Pierre and Estelle. The giant smacked his lips and rubbed his massive mitts at the sight of the delicacy before him. “Let’s let them soak until tomorrow. I love them good and salty.” They covered the barrel again and set about to bargaining over the price.
The old whistle whittler had been right about the butcher, and he was also right about Saint Nick being in the area. He’d come to the land to bring his yearly bounty of gifts for the good children and he was miles away from the butcher shop. As promised, though, he heard the whistles blow once, twice, carried to him on the winter breeze. He knew immediately that it was one of his own whistles and that it meant there were children in danger. Two blasts, though, meant that the danger was still a long ways away, so he didn’t need to hurry. He had plenty of time to finish his errands before going to their aid. He finished giving out all of the gifts in his sack before he headed in the direction of the whistle blasts.
By that time, the snow lay deep in the forest, making travel difficult, but a full moon was shining in the sky making the path clear and bright as Saint Nick moved along on his snowshoes. It was very late by the time he finally arrived at the butcher shop that the whistled pleas for help had come from. He entered the shop just as the shopkeeper and the giant were taking their last look at the pickling children for absolutely no reason except to let Saint Nick see them being sneaky and suspicious. He must have some magical power of wild coincidence or something. Don’t think about it too hard.
The butcher and the giant didn’t know who Saint Nick was exactly (they had always been naughty), but he didn’t seem at all surprised to be confronted by a motherfucking giant, so they were mostly confused (especially since he had just waltzed in to the shop in the middle of the night like he owned the place). They replaced the lid on the brine barrel hurriedly and turned to face him. Saint Nick wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but he had a pretty good sixth sense for people being naughty and it was ringing like an alarm bell. He decided to trust his instincts.
“Gentlemen, I would like some meat. I have a hankering for pickled meat, and that barrel you just opened smells delectable. I’d like some of that, please.” He was more than a little suspicious about the weird way they were acting around that barrel. He figured the kids might be hiding in the barrel (which isn’t entirely inaccurate). The butcher cleared his throat. “No, no, that meat’s not very good. The meat in the back room is much better. I’ll go get some for you.” Saint Nick followed the butcher into the next room, leaving the giant to awkwardly sit on the barrel and try to hide it under his bulk.
There was a second brine barrel back here with one small morsel of meat at the very bottom. The butcher looked uncomfortable at being caught in his now super-obvious lie, but Saint Nick seemed not to notice. “That piece will work. I’ll take it.” The butcher leaned down into the barrel, reaching for the meat, and Saint Nick snuck up behind him, grabbed his legs, and flipped him neatly into the barrel head-first. The butcher spluttered and kicked, trying desperately to get out of the barrel, but Saint Nick shoved him as deep as he would go, placed the lid back on the barrel, and then stacked several heavy weights atop it to keep him from getting out until he drowned. Bear in mind here that Saint Nick has nothing but a vague suspicion that the man he just straight-up murdered has done anything wrong at all. Santa is brutal.
One down, one to go. Saint Nick returned to the main room where the giant was still sitting on the barrel. “The butcher is wrapping up my meat for me, but he said the best stuff is in that hogshead over there, and he told me to ask you to fetch it for me since you’re tall enough to actually reach in and get it for me. Do you mind?” The giant wasn’t sure what was going on exactly (he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, being a wicked giant and all) but he trusted that the butcher knew what he was doing and never thought to even consider that this strange man could be lying.
He uncovered the hogshead and reached in, groping for the meat at the very bottom of the massive thing. Saint Nick climbed silently onto a box beside him and picked up a huge leg bone that was lying nearby. He took careful aim, then bashed the giant over the head. He’d aimed to kill him outright, but the giant had a thick skull and was only dazed. It was enough to make him dizzy, and he slipped on some briney water that had splashed to the floor while he was groping and fell head-first into the brine. He screamed and kicked and fought, but his massive shoulders had gotten good and wedged in the hogshead and he didn’t have the leverage to pull himself out from this position (and Santa sure as shit wasn’t going to help – he stood there and watched the body go limp like the ice-cold bastard he was). Again, Santa has murdered two people without even knowing that a crime has been committed, let alone that they’re guilty of it.
Once he was sure that the giant had drowned, he went to open the brine barrel the two miscreants had been so weird about. Inside, he found two children, dead and pickling in the brine. Unperturbed, he fished them out, cleaned them off, and used his magical powers to bring them back to life. He fed them and let them warm themselves by the fire (being dead for a few hours will really do a number on your circulation after all). Once they were recovered (except for the inevitable PTSD and psychological scarring from being murdered and remembering what it feels like to die), he gathered some meat from the shop, abandoned the corpses to rot, and took the children back to their grandmother.
They cooked the broth she wanted for her, and dear grandmama was soon the picture of health again and everyone was more or less happy (again, aside from the life-long trauma from being murdered). From that day forward, the land was never again troubled by giants since Saint Nick promised to never allow children to come to harm, so long as they always kept their whistles on them and blew softly on it when they were in distress.
This is an incredibly wild story. Show of hands, who expected Santa to be a stone-cold executioner? And the craziest bit about this particular fairy tale? It’s based on a story of an actual miracle supposedly performed by the historical Saint Nicholas of Myra (in modern day Turkey). There are a number of wild stories about him, but the story at hand tells of how he resurrected three children who had been murdered and pickled in brine by a butcher who was planning to go full Sweeny Todd and sell them to unsuspecting customers as pork, although the story appears to have been added in the late medieval period, meaning that there’s probably no actual historical basis to this one, but it still makes one hell of a Christmas story that you should definitely share with any children you encounter this holiday season. They’ll love to hear about Santa revenge-killing child-murdering cannibals!
With the children once more safe and sound and definitely haunted by nightmares for life, it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s monster is Belsnickel.
If you’re a fan of the NBC sitcom The Office (and let’s face it, who isn’t?), you might remember the time that Dwight Schrute dressed up in a dirty fur coat and furry hat, smeared coal on his face, and shoved twigs in his fake beard to go and whip his naughty coworkers. What you might not know is that this creature, known as Belsnickel, is not only not something created for Dwight’s twisted imagination, but is a completely real character from the folklore of the Pennsylvania Dutch, making it also completely feasible that Dwight would have grown up with his stories.
See, back in the late 16 and early 1700s, when German and Swiss immigrants first came to America, they found it populated by English immigrants who had no interest in celebrating this “Christmas” thing, figuring it smacked of popery and paganism (and I mean, they’re not wrong). It was a huge thing in Germany though (see Episode 23 for the whole Krampus thing), so they kept their traditions of caroling, tree decorating, and other now-traditional holiday merriment. They also brought Belsnickel to the New World with them, where it would spread, and survives to this day in some parts of Pennsylvania and Canada.
This masked, disheveled, terrifying figure (usually played by an uncle or cousin) would arrive unannounced on some night in December (unlike Krampus, who always appeared on Krampusnacht) and would announce his presence at the home by rapping on the window with the wooden switch he used to beat naughty children. Understandably, the children would usually scream in terror and try to go hide somewhere in the house, but they would be gathered up by their parents and forced to confront the Christmas judge. In a deep, rumbling voice, Belsnickel would ask each child in turn if they had been naughty or nice over the past year. Admitting your misdeeds honestly would earn you a small rap on the knuckles, but lying would earn you a whipping from Belsnickel’s cane. Once each child had been judged and punished, they were asked to recite a prayer or demonstrate something they had learned in school over the previous year, earning them a present or treat from the bag of gifts Belsnickel carried on his back.
In another variation, Belsnickel would instead scatter treats and small toys on the ground, resulting in a mad scramble by the kids to gather and claim as much as possible. All the while, Belsnickel would be whipping the backs of the excited children with his switch, which the children would endure because, you know, presents! Unlike a lot of the characters who were seen as companions of some version of Santa, Belsnickel was both the beloved and the feared creature rolled into one. Dark stories were told of him kidnapping truly naughty children from their beds, never to be seen again, and his name would be used as a threat throughout the year to keep kids in line. So if you see a masked man in ragged, dirty furs whipping children while tossing candy at them with the other hand and demanding to know if they are ‘Impish or Adorable’, you can sit back and enjoy watching the delighted children being whipped for their toys in this traditional holiday merriment.
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on Stitcher, on TuneIn, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth and on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you like what you’ve heard, I’d appreciate a review on iTunes. These reviews really help increase the show’s standing and let more people know it exists. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff, whom you can find on fiverr.com.
Next time, the death of 2019 will be just around the corner, so we’re going to have a special New Year’s episode! You’ll learn that you should bet on old men with sticks over deadly dragon demons, that dragons are a lot like dogs, and that you should always face your demons even if it gets some of you eaten. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll learn that a package of Tums could have prevented the universe’s creation. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.