So, I think I may have found a Christmas-related folklore figure even creepier than Krampus, and since the holiday is later this week I figured I’d talk about her.

That figure, of course, is the Austrian Frau Perchta, also called Frau Berchta or Bertha.

Frau Perchta generally takes the form of a very, very old woman, dressed in rags, a beak-like nose, and a cane. Oh, she also typically carries a long knife under her skirt. Why does she have the knife, you ask? Why, it’s to disembowel naughty children and people with unkempt homes, of course! Then she replaces the entrails with stones and straw.

That’s a wonderful thought for this, the most wonderful time of the year.

Perchta, isn’t all bad, though. She also tends to give gifts to those who have been good, usually in the form of silver coins left in their shoes, or in a pail. She also has an association with spinning, as one of her duties is to make sure that the girls managed to spin their portion of flax for the year. If she finds that they didn’t, well, they got the punishment detailed above.

Side note: you will probably notice that the association with spinning/weaving is very similar to the Icelandic Yule Cat, which I talked about last week. That’s not really here nor there, but I just thought it was an interesting connection.

Perchta, as the above notes, tends to show up during the twelve days of Christmas, which are basically the days between December 25 and January 6. The thing is, though, that Perchta may actually be way older than Christianity, as she may be linked to the Germanic goddess Hulda or Holle. Hulda, in fact, may actually predate the Norse pantheon that we’ve all come to know and love.

Hulda would have basically been a supreme mother goddess, and her feast was celebrated in midwinter. She’s also the one who taught humans the art of weaving in the first place, which very clearly fits with Perchta’s whole deal. It’s believed that Hulda got downgraded to Perchta after the area was Christianized and a lot of the previous gods were demonized as a result.

Perchta  is also sometimes the leader the Wild Hunt, a host of the unhallowed dead that flies around in midwinter to generally cause havoc, or sometimes reward people. Perchta’s version of the Wild Hunt also includes a retinue of unbaptized babies. Which is interesting when we go back to Hulda, who was the shepherd of souls who had died in infancy.

So that, my friends, is a brief rundown on Frau Perchta. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some cleaning to do.