A Californian Krampus

St. Nicholas play produced by Krampus Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Koudounaris

Relentlessly sunny and known for a love of trend over tradition, Los Angeles is an unlikely home to a new incarnation of the old Alpine devil. It helps, perhaps, that make-believe is serious business in my town, and that it’s filled with creative people prone to see in an old tradition of folk Catholicism a revolutionary way to shake up the holidays.

A Pied Piper Mystery

Kate Greenaway’s illustration for Robert Browning’s 1888 poem, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pied_Piper2.jpg

hile the Pied Piper of Hamelin is undeniably a fairy tale, it’s uniquely grounded in real-world specifics – the date for one – June 26. That’s the date in 1284 when the town lost a significant portion of its population, a matter treated as fact in the first written allusion to the incidents, the initial […]

Skogsrå and Huldra: The femme fatale of the Scandinavian forests

Huldra in the forest.

Tolkien describes the Old Forest, a space filled with deep-rooted mysteries and danger in Middle-earth. Although, this takes place in his “secondary world”, it still sets the mood, turns our thoughts in the right direction, as we try to imagine the deep, dark and mysterious forests of the Nordic countries, which are very real and exists in our world.

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