The Whipping Father was the Freddy Krueger of his day

The Whipping Father was the Freddy Krueger of his day

Move over, Krampus! Meet the Whipping Father, Père Fouettard if you’re nasty (or French). As one of Santa’s many creepy friends, Père Fouettard travels alongside the man in red to dish out violent delights to disobedient children. Known mostly in the northern and eastern regions of France, the Whipping Father stalks through the country with his flog in hand on Saint Nicholas Day. The best that a bad child can hope to get from the Whipping Father is a lump of coal, and those who are truly wicked get—wait for it—a whipping from Santa’s sociopathic buddy.

Source: Steemit

Where does a monster like this come from? In 10th-century France, stories circulated about an innkeeper, or sometimes a butcher, who kidnapped wealthy boys and drugged, tortured, and killed them before taking their money and cooking their bodies in a stew. In some variations of the story, he hangs their bodies to dry age during the wintry months, because everyone knows that rich kid tastes better when it’s tenderized. Nothing escapes the ever-watchful eye of that North Pole overlord, however, so Santa Claus pounced on the child killer of indeterminate employment and carried out his own brand of Laplandic justice: He resurrected the killer’s victims and forced the man who would be called Père Fouettard to work as his partner.

Leather tanners love this guy

Source: Pinterest

There’s no clear origin story for the Whipping Father, and while his early life as a child-killing innkeeper/butcher/amateur cook is all well and good, it’s just as likely that he started working with Santa Claus in 1552 after the Siege of Metz, a town in eastern France. The siege was a small part of the Italian War of 1551 in which the French fought off thousands of troops from the Holy Roman Empire before dragging an effigy of Charles V through the streets. It happened to take place through the Christmas season, and around the same time, a group of tanners happened to come up with a creepy mascot for their profession who was armed with a whip and wrapped in chains. His sole focus on Earth was to punish disobedient children, and how that relates to tanning is something we can all agree is best left unquestioned. Somehow, the tanner mascot and the effigy of Charles V became mixed up with one another, and the resulting abomination became known as Père Fouettard.