Darkest Christmas: December 1942 and a world at war

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Nothing says Christmas like getting naked with your family! In Estonia, it’s traditional for the whole family to take a sauna together on Christmas Eve before church. Chief among Santa's entourage of shady characters is Krampus, a demon with massive horns whose main job is to drag naughty children to Hell. Apparently, Santa doesn't really want to know if you've been naughty, so a few weeks before Christmas, he sends Krampus around to weed out the bad children. If you’re celebrating Christmas in Finland, you might find yourself in a cemetery… at night. The Finns go to the cemetery on Christmas Eve and light candles at the graves of passed family members. It’s a quiet and solemn ceremony, but it’s sure to unsettle some young Finnish children every year.

Christmas Horror Movies Ranked by Tomatometer | Rotten 40 Christmas Horror Movies Ranked by Tomatometer | Rotten

In 1934, songwriter Haven Gillespie was asked by his publisher to write a Christmas song for children. Having gone to the meeting directly from his brother Irwin's funeral, Gillespie had no interest in the project. Somehow he was talked into it and began writing the song on his train ride home. Thinking of all the pleasant memories he created with his brother during the holidays, Gillespie wrote "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town."

32. Dark Santa

There’s a reason the NHS invested in Microsoft office. It works. Even if you’re not an excel whizz, & you only scratch the surface of pivot tables, someone who is can send you their work, and you can open it, and embed it in Word, forward it via Outlook and discuss over Teams. Between 1966 and 1970, the Godfather of Soul made a string of Christmas records, some of them funky (“Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto”), some of them deep (a spectacular soul version of “The Christmas Song”), and some of them totally bizarre. This one is the weirdest: a churning, overwrought orchestral groove, over which JB apparently improvises a totally incoherent rant about Christmas, peace protesters, God, partying, and (tellingly) wine. By the end, he’s quoting “Hava Nagila” and “Volaré.” The original single included an instrumental version labeled “Sing Along With James,” as if that were possible. D.W. Crass –“Merry Crassmas” (1981) Peg Aloi is a freelance film and TV critic, media studies scholar and nature worshipper based in New York state.

Dark Jokes - Dark Humor! | The Humor Zone 40 Seriously Dark Jokes - Dark Humor! | The Humor Zone

We can't talk about dark Christmas movies without recognizing perhaps the most famous one of all, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Though a portion of its fanbase considers the film a Halloween tradition, we find it just as delightful and ghoulish around the holidays too.

13. Nothing Says Christmas Like Cryptozoology

Le Père Fouettard means “The Whipping Father,” and you can probably guess what he does. This French/Belgian character accompanies Saint Nicholas, whipping the children who weren’t nice. Forget turkey… in South Africa, many people enjoy the deep-fried caterpillars of the Emperor Moth on Christmas Day!

Best Dark and Scary Christmas Movies | GQ The 10 Best Dark and Scary Christmas Movies | GQ

Placide Cappeau de Roquemaure was commissioned to write a poem for Christmas mass in 1847, and wrote the lyrics to "O Holy Night" based on the nativity Bible stories. Cappeau thought the impact of his words would be more powerful set to music, and asked Adolphe Charles Adams to create the score. Just like in other countries, people in Glamorgan, Wales go from house to house caroling. But unlike in other countries, they bring around freaky horse figure called the Mari Lwyd, and they try to argue their way (with song) into the house for food and gifts. What were the gleefully blasphemous British anarcho-punks Crass (who also brought us Christ—The Album) doing making a Christmas record? Having a laugh, as usual. “Merry Crassmas” is a chirpy instrumental medley of holiday favorites: “Jingle Bells,”“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,”“Nagasaki Nightmare,”“Punk Is Dead”…most of Crass’ early repertoire, in fact, gets the twinkly Casio treatment between snatches of Christmas carols. The record’s sleeve offered a competition to identify all the Crass songs included herein: “First prize, bath salts. Second prize, one Exploited single. Third prize, two Exploited singles.” D.W. Beneath some of the great Christmas classics runs a current of darker, older beliefs underlying the cosy festivitiesThe author Piers Torday had been similarly obsessed with the story as a child. He wanted to stage an adaptation while at university with two friends who shared his passion for it, but the rights were not available, and the project was forgotten. Twenty-five years on, the stars aligned: the same friends were now a theatre executive and a producer, and Torday’s new adaptation of The Box of Delights has just opened at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London. years ago I thought we might achieve this, but I don’t think we’re any closer to seamless integration between different clinical systems. The horrifying truth about Christmas is that the holiday does more than just remind children to be grateful and kind; it teaches them that tiny recon elves are real, other dimensions exist, and the whole holiday is basically a massive re-working of the Pagan Yuletide festival.

Darkest Christmas: December 1942 and a World at War Darkest Christmas: December 1942 and a World at War

The funniest sub on Reddit. Hundreds of jokes posted each day, and some of them aren't even reposts! A man dressed as the Père Fouettard parades during the festivities of Saint Nicholas in Nancy, eastern France. Photograph: Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP via Getty Images

23. “Stand Under This and Kiss Me!” “No Thanks.”

At the same time, Christmas 1942 saw the injunction of 'good will to man' distorted in ugly and callous ways. At Auschwitz, SS guards played cruel games with their prisoners. In Berlin, the German heart of darkness, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels spent time with his family while still buried in feverish fantasies about the Jewish world conspiracy. As if they Yule Lads weren’t creepy enough, Icelanders also tell children about their horrifying mother Grýla. She’s a hoofed half-ogre, half-troll who’s covered in warts and has large, terrifying horns. She gets her children to snatch bad boys and girls from their homes at Christmas so she can cook and eat them. This story was so terrifying to Icelandic children that the government eventually had to ban using the story of Grýla and the Yule Lads as an intimidation tactic to make children behave. Masefield, who wrote only two stories for children – The Box of Delights is a sequel to The Midnight Folk – was a direct influence on JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, yet the books are far less familiar to children now. Like many people of my generation, I discovered The Box of Delights through the 1984 BBC adaptation; at the age of 10, I found a frisson in its references to pagan folklore, Arthurian legend and medieval philosophy that I had not encountered in more sanitised children’s stories. It nourished my lifelong fascination with Renaissance occultism.