If you thought Christmas was behind us, you may be in for a wild surprise.
Especially if you’re in Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria or several other countries in southeastern Europe today.
Be careful and keep your wits about you, because the Christmas goblins are on the loose again.
Their Greek name is Kallikantzaroi.
According to folklore, these goblins spend most of the year in the underworld, trying to saw down the tree that holds up the heavens and the earth and keeps it all spinning.
But during the Twelve Days of Christmas, the barrier between their world and ours is at its weakest, because the baby Jesus has been born but not yet been baptized.
So, of course, the goblins come on up.
In a way this is good news, because this is when they’re on the cusp of cutting the World Tree down, and we don’t want them to finish that.
But it also means that goblins are roaming around our world playing tricks on us.
They wreck our furniture, they turn our milk sour, they use our fireplaces as toilets.
What can you expect? They’re goblins.
But hope is not lost! They say a Yule log in the fireplace can keep them away.
Or you can put a colander outside your front door; the goblins can’t resist counting the holes, but they also can’t count past three so they’re stuck.
And their reign of terror ends at Epiphany, at which point they head back down to the underworld.
By then, the World Tree has healed itself, and the goblins try to saw it down again and the cycle repeats itself.
The holidays can be hectic, so sometimes the day after Christmas is the first time in a long time when people can just sit for a bit, maybe with a nice hot cup of coffee.
If you’re one of them, it may interest you to know that today in 1865, James Mason of Franklin, Massachusetts obtained the first US patent for a coffee percolator.
Kallikantzaroi: Tree-Chopping Christmas Goblins (The Atlas of Christmas by Alex Palmer, via Google Books)
James H. Mason (Franklin Historical Museum)
Legend has it that one way to stop the Christmas goblins is to back a really good podcast on Patreon
Illustration by Spencer Alexander McDaniel via Wikicommons/Creative Commons
