“No, no, no, no,” cried Jimena in a panic, running from the open front door and into the room where her mother was folding clothes.

“What’s the matter?” Ángeles asked with urgent concern, dropping the laundry to the floor and embracing her terrified daughter. “What’s wrong? What happened?” questioned Ángeles as she pried her daughter’s arms from around her waist and held her back to look in her frightened face.

Jimena couldn’t speak and could only point her trembling finger towards the front door.

Ángeles walked cautiously to the open front door, expecting a glimpse of one of the village’s wild dogs or a serpent sunning itself on the cobblestone walkway to their house. Jimena had left the door wide open, and sitting on the front step was something far worse and menacing—a bundle of sticks knotted together with a shredded piece of red fabric.

There was only one being that would leave a bundle of sticks so close to December 5th, and that was the beast himself, the dark Santa, the horned punisher of children: Krampus!

The red rope was grisly-looking, a sticky red that attracted flies, no doubt stained with blood. It was a symbol of fair warning that a naughty child in the house would be taken by Krampus on his day, December 5th, the day before the feast of St. Nickolas. A red rope meant the child was never to return.

The room began to spin, and Ángeles fainted, collapsing onto the floor.

“Mother! Mother!” pleaded Jimena, “Please wake up!” Jimena began to shake her unconscious mother by the shoulders, “Mother! You must wake up!”

A blurry vision of Jimena began to come into view, her teary eyes streaming down her cheeks. Ángeles regained her consciousness and looked about. She was still disoriented and unsure how she ended up on the floor. Her eyes once again saw the bundle of sticks tied with the red rope. A shock ripped through her again, and had she not already been lying down, she likely would have passed out once more.

“It’s from Krampus, isn’t it?” weep Jimena. “He’s going to take me on Krampus Day if you don’t do something. Get up! Get up! You need to fix this!”

With unsteady legs, Ángeles slowly worked her way to her knees and then wobbled as she stood up.

Jimena stood back, not offering to help her mother off the floor. She bit her nails with nervous anxiety as she stared at the bundle of sticks.

Making her way to the kitchen table, Ángeles moved as if she were drunk, then pulled out a chair and dropped into it.

“Mother! You can’t sit down! Fix this! You have to tell Krampus that I’m a good girl and that he has the wrong house! Go! Go now!” Jimena demanded, pointing at the door and insisting her mother scramble to get a message to Krampus.

“I’ll take care of this, Jimena. You go on to school, and I’ll figure this out.” Ángeles flicked her hand towards the door for Jimena to leave. “And don’t tell anyone about this,” she added.

Grabbing up her school books, Jimena made her way out the door, stepping around the bushel of sticks with caution as if each one of them were a venomous snake ready to strike. As soon as she was cleared of the bushel, she darted off toward the schoolhouse.

At the table, Ángeles held her face in her hands. She didn’t know what to do. What she did know was that her daughter was lovely to look at, but not nice when spoken to. Jimena didn’t have any friends because she was so cruel to the other children, teasing them and even hitting them with rocks. She was even disrespectful to adults, constantly interrupting adult conversations and back-talking when told to behave. Ángeles tried to talk to her, even pleading with Jimena to be good, but her daughter only laughed at her and said Ángeles was a terrible mother.

Ángeles was lenient with her and tried to make her feel twice the love of a parent, given that her father had left them when Jimena was only a toddler. Now her daughter, her only child, her only family, was about to be taken by Krampus. Ángeles blamed herself for everything.

Getting up from the table, Ángeles went to the front door and grabbed the bundle of sticks wrapped in a bloodied rope. She looked around before she closed the door, hoping none of the other villagers saw the shameful warning that came with nightfall: Krampus was coming to their house.

What would she do? What could she do? Krampus was very real, and everyone in the village feared him, especially the children. But except on Krampus Day, no one ever saw him or knew where he lived. Some believed he rose from a nearby volcano, and others thought he dwelt in dark caves deep in the earth, with entrances hidden from human eyes. How could Ángeles meet with him and plead her case for her daughter? Or bring him something that would please him and tempt him into forgiveness. Folktales said he didn’t care about the parents, and when he came for the children, he wouldn’t even look at them or listen to their pleas; he only looked at the child and listened to the whining and crying as if it were music to his ears. Even if she knew how to find him, he wouldn’t listen to her, a mother pleading on behalf of their bratty child.

After pondering a long while, a memory came back to her. It was a story she heard when she was a little girl about Krampus visiting the naughty child, and if he felt the child was sincere and would change their evil ways, he would grant them a pardon, at least until the following year at Yule time.

Ángeles tapped her head with the knuckles of her fists. “Remember! Remember!” she told herself, trying to recall how the children had been able to visit Krampus and plead their case.

A startle shook her, “That’s it! Now I remember! The sticks! I have to use the sticks!”

She remembered that parents would place the sticks from the bundle around the child when they slept, and the child could visit Krampus in their dreams, or more likely, their nightmares. If the child were convincing and sincere, they would wake in the morning and tell their parents about their visit with Krampus and that, from that day forward, they would pledge to be good. But there were also the others, the children who either disappeared from their rooms without a trace or were found dead in their beds with the look of terror hardened with rigor mortis on their faces.

Even if Jimena visited Krampus, she would only seal her own doom with her uncontrollable snide remarks and demeaning tone, thought Ángeles. Even standing in the face of Krampus, Jimena couldn’t pretend to be nice, she admitted to herself.

Her knuckles tapped her head again, seeking a solution.

“I got it! I’ll take Jimena’s place!” Ángeles said out loud. She considered assuming her daughter’s identity long enough to convince Krampus that she was not a bratty young girl. Ángeles did look young for her age, and she was a relatively young mother, having given birth to Jimena when she was barely 18. People often asked if they were sisters, and they both had flaxen blond hair. Jimena hit a growth spurt last year that put her almost at Ángeles’s height.

Ángeles got up and looked in the mirror. She still seemed relatively young, and Jimena was already developing beyond her adolescent age. Ángeles lifted her hair into two ponytails and looked at herself from all angles in the mirror. Indeed, she might seem a juvenile except for her well-developed breasts that strained at the bodice of her dress, and her revealing cleavage that Ángeles flaunted when strolling the market. After all, she was single and shameless when it came to attracting the eyes of a prospective suitor. Ángeles folded her arms across her chest, flattened her breasts as best she could, and pinched the neckline of her dress together in a conservative fashion, in keeping with the strict school dress code for young ladies. She again assumed her most innocent and youthful expression, one that was bashful and docile—a look rarely seen in Jimena except when she was attempting to shift blame onto someone else or dupe someone into giving her what she wanted.

“Yes,” Ángeles said with a tight smile that formed a dimple in her cheek, “I know I can fool that thick-skulled and dimwitted Krampus. After all, he’s only a half-wit goat-man that hides in the shadows of Saint Nicholas. He only comes out once a year. He probably has never seen Jimena,” Ángeles assured herself as she studied her face and pinched her cheeks hard to bring a lively rouge to her complexion. “Yes, I know I can do this. It will probably be dark, and I can increase the pitch of my voice. He won’t have any idea that I’m not Jimena.” She laid a thoughtful finger to her chin, “A little bribery can’t hurt either. Perhaps a basket filled with fruit, cheese, wine, and cookies. All of these would be grand treats for a mongrel that probably feeds on grass or table scraps stolen from the sow’s trough.”

Ángeles started working on her plan, putting together a food basket for Krampus. She began to dress by wrapping a stretchy, woven fabric around her chest to compress her breasts and make them appear smaller and unassuming. She picked out a brightly colored holiday dress, red with lace at the hem and neckline, and matching calf-high socks with shoes that buckled at the top. It was an outfit popular among the schoolgirls this time of year, and Ángeles buttoned it all the way up to the top of her neckline. She wore light makeup to add a youthful glow to her cheeks and put her hair up into ponytails. When she was done, she looked in the mirror. She looked years younger, and to the casual eye, she closely resembled Jimena.

With the basket in her bed, she lay down and placed the sticks around her as the legend instructed. She closed her eyes and fell into a deep sleep.