I have heard of St. Nicolas Day before, where children leave their shoes outside their rooms and Nicolas will come overnight to fill them. It’s the start of the Santa tale. But St. Nicolas Day is actually on the 5th of December rather than Christmas Day. And being the good German Swiss that we are, we don’t move holidays.
A little more on St. Nicholas in this part of the world…
First of all, its Sankt Nikolaus, not St. Nicholas; for ease of my writing, I’m going to go with Nikolaus through the rest of this post, but only because he & I hung out this evening and we’re now friends. Everyone else, please maintain your formality.
Nikolaus is dressed very much like a bishop, rides on a horse, and is welcomed at public places by large crowds. He has a long beard, and loves children, except when they have been naughty. He fills the boots of children on the 5th of December with gifts and sweets, and at the same time checks up on the children to see if they were good, polite and helpful the last year. If they were not, they will have a stick (eine Rute, in German) in their boots instead. Nikolaus is also accompanied by Krampus, represented as a beast-like creature, generally demonic in appearance. Krampus is thought to punish children during the Yule season who had misbehaved, and to capture particularly naughty children in his sack and carry them away to his lair. I’m not kidding - even at 40, I was still a little scared of Krampus in some of the places we’ve seen him! Seriously, google him. Scary!
Our little town of Mauren backs up to an area called Schellenberg. I talked about it in our hiking adventures here. It’s 1.4 sq mi of mountainous area that is covered in forests. And this evening, Nikolaus visited the forest (and set up tents with bratwurst and glühwein) so children and the young at heart could visit.
We parked at the bottom of the mountain and hiked 20 minutes up to Nikolaus’ hut for our visit with him.
We met Nikolaus and got to tour his cabin in the forest.
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