Merry Christmas! Krampus traditions linking a perhaps pre-Christian hairy goat-demon with Santa got revived in Eastern European countries by the early 1900s. Krampus played the bad cop to Santa’s good guy, beating bad children with birch switches and dragging them down to hell with chains. Some traditions are best left in the past. . . .
In the very late 19th- and early 20th- centuries, the Spiritualist movement had a strong influence in Western Europe and the United States. Many adherents…
On a lovely January morning, I walked the LeTorte trail, which runs along the eponymous nature preserve. LeTorte’s name comes from an early 18th-century…