Christmas tree without a theme? A busy bush, is what it is. I wasn’t about to have people come into our apartment and think we just put ornaments and lights up wherever we wanted like a couple of normal people. We were a gay couple, after all. And I have a lifelong quest to make everything as complicated as possible. “Cranberry and Pewter,” I declared one night, sailing into the living room and studiously avoiding looking at the person being sawed in half on Jay’s computer screen. “Those are our colors. Not red and gray. Cranberry and Pewter. I’ve already bought the ornaments from Target. Unfortunately, we don’t have any room for any old ornaments or sentimental keepsakes this year. We’re just doing two colors, plus white lights, possibly a museum plaque on the side where I can give some background on my thought process.”
Jay stared at me blankly. It’s wonderful to collaborate.
The tree was, objectively, breathtaking. (Please remember my two semesters of art history at Columbia; this is classically trained objectivity.) We set up one of Jay’s cameras across the room and took a warm, Cranberry-and-Pewter family photo, which got so many likes on Facebook. It was all I ever wanted.
I can’t say, however, if it’s what Jay wanted. I assumed it was because I assumed that’s what a relationship was: getting everything you want exactly the way you want it, a melding of minds but not really a melding so much as my mind staying the same and the other person just sort of being subsumed. That may sound bad to you but I encourage you to think of it as romantic instead.
Close to Christmas, we went to a holiday party with a bunch of Jay’s friends near his hometown. Many of his friends were also horror movie aficionados, and their conversation naturally veered over to old favorites, movie news, sinister fan art they’d found online, and the like. I busied myself with a plate of hummus across the room. As we were leaving, one of his friends stopped Jay and presented him with a gift the friend had been working on. It was an Elf on the Shelf doll, but the red and white clothes had been replaced by black clothes, its skin had been painted green, and its grin had been accentuated with red lips and two tiny white fangs. This was no longer an Elf. “It’s a Krampus!” Jay cried with delight. He hugged it close to himself; I crossed myself even though I grew up Baptist and I wasn’t really sure how to do it.
I knew what a Krampus was, because I’d read David Sedaris’s essay “Six to Eight Black Men.” In some Northern European countries Santa Claus has a sidekick or helper who doles out punishment for bad children. Sometimes that sidekick is a squad of black men, like backup dancers. Other times, that sidekick is a Krampus, a werewolf-looking demon figure. And the punishment? The Krampus drags the children to hell.
“I can’t wait to put this on the tree!” Jay exclaimed.
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The ride home was tense: Jay amiably chatting, me having a quiet but steadily escalating panic attack, and our new addition, Santa’s demon friend, radiating heat from the backseat.
One of my spiritual gifts is the ability to spiral out of control at the smallest provocation, and a creature who knows the access code to hell is no small provocation. I started rethinking our entire relationship as we drove back from Jersey into Philadelphia. If Jay loves these dark things so much, I thought, who must he be? Either he is just a different kind of person, someone who likes scary things, or he is conspiring with the elf, the devil, and Pontius Pilate to try to steal my soul. I couldn’t stomach the idea of the latter, so for most of our time together I chose to believe the former. But it never really went away.
I couldn’t shake the idea that my soul was in mortal danger. I felt like if I was a better Christian I would have known what to do in this situation, but gone were my youthful days of zealotry, like the summer I went to a revival and came home convinced I had to break all my Janet Jackson CDs in half. I realized that my interpretation of God warriordom had become laxer, more modern in the years since growing up and coming out. I strove to understand the Bible in context and