Naughty or Nice?

Alpine Village Bakery

When I was growing up I had wonderful parents that played the part of St. Nicholas and Santa Claus. Every year on December 5th my family would get together with another family and celebrate St. Nicholas Eve. We would sit on the floor of the living room around the coffee table and eat appetizer-type goodies of the winter nature (don't ask about the correlation) while listening to festive music in the background. After eating we would read the story of the original St. Nicholas and then play games. Later that night when it was time to go to bed, my brother, sister and I would put our shoes outside of our bedroom doors and the next morning each of us would find a special gift. On the off chance the dog didn't tear everything to shreds trying to get to the chocolate shoved in the toes of the shoes, my brother always got a Smoker and a large piece of coal, my sister always got a Nutcracker and a medium piece of coal, and I always got a piece of the Alpine Village china collection...and maybe a little coal too. The gift was to reward us for being good children and the coal was to symbolize all of our wrong-doings that we committed over the past year.

Switzerland does things a little different. Let me introduce you to Samichlaus (pronounced Sammy -claus) and Schmutzli (pronounced Sh-mm-uu-zz-lee). Samichlaus is the equivalent of the American idea of St. Nicholas. He wears a red robe, has a long white beard, jolly smile, and big bag of toys. He comes to the children bearing gifts and smiles and jolly good times like the Santa Claus we all love. Schmutzli, on the other hand, is Samichlaus' sinister demon possessed companion based on a child abductor from the late 1400s. Wait...what? Yep. In Switzerland, if you behaved badly, Schmutzli, dressed in a black cloak, would come kidnap you, put you in a burlap sack and carry you off into the forest. In some areas of Switzerland the children are told that they would be dumped into a river to drown. Oh, and did I forget to mention his broom made twigs for administering physical punishment to children who behaved sub-par? Ahhhh, nothing spreads Holiday Spirit like striking fear and terror in the eyes of young children.


Samichlaus



Schmutzli

I don't know about you, but a legendary tale like this one might not have as much inspired me to behave better as it probably would have just given me nightmares as a child. I did, after all, have nightmares for two weeks after seeing the movie Jumanji (there are some seriously large spiders towards the end). As an "interim third parent" to a youngin' myself, I wouldn't dare risk telling the story of Schmutzli on the slight chance it might improve the boy's behavior (surely to last for the better part of 20 minutes) for sheer fear that the tale would invade the poor boy's dreams and keep me up half the night protecting him from the Swiss Boogieman with a holiday nuance. It's a good thing he's only two and his attention span for the story would last through "There once was a man..." before he yelled "Shhtop!" and told me to build him a tunnel for his trains instead.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to learn about how the holidays are celebrated in different cultures. I think that each new tradition I learn about is a window into the minds and workings of the Swiss. No wonder they are stereotyped into be perfect and rigid sometimes - they were raised thinking that they would become the cast of Blair Witch Project if they didn't! All goes to say...I don't think this is a tradition I will pass on to my hypothetical future children.