NEWSWORKS TONIGHT

There are no Christmas lights up at Janet Finegar's house in Northern Liberties. She does not deck her halls with boughs of holly. Instead, hundreds of rib bones hang on a clothesline strung across her back yard, bleaching in the sun.

"They have been scraped, boiled, scraped again, bleached and are now hanging out to dry," said Finegar. "They're fairly disgusting. They smell. Rib bones are incredibly nasty."

She will drape those bones over herself, like a grisly tunic. It's her Krampus costume.

The Krampus is a character from Austrian folklore, common in European alpine regions. The creature stands on two hooves and has horns growing out of its skull. An extremely long tongue falls out of its mouth. And it carries a basket to haul away naughty children.

For hundreds of year the Krampus and Saint Nicholas have operated a good cop/bad cop routine. Saint Nick rewards the good children, Krampus terrorizes the bad.

Bad children are said to be abducted into the forest, thrown into icy rivers, or eaten by the Krampus.

"If everything is sweet and lovely, and the most wonderful time of the year, some people start to get nauseated," said Finegar. "I want a little salt to go with the sugar. I think there are a lot of people out there who enjoy having a little salt."

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Around the country there are Krampus parties and club nights where people dress in leftover Halloween costumes to drink, dance, and flirt. But Finegar is co-organizing a traditional Krampuslauf, wherein parents dressed in horns and goatskins parade through a neighborhood (in this case, Northern Liberties, at Liberty Lands park) with noisemakers and masks for the children.

The traditional day of Krampus is Dec. 5, followed by Saint Nicholas day on Dec. 6. In Northern Liberties it happens on Saturday, Dec. 10.

Although fairly common on Austria and Switzerland, Krampus parades are rare in the United Sates. Last year, Joseph Ragan organized one in Portland, Oregon, as a reaction to how Christmas dominates the season.

"A lot of it has to do with the environmental effect of having canned Christmas music in the speakers every time I go to the grocery store, for months at a time," said Ragan, a.k.a. Arun Once-Was-Zygoat. "Of all the 10,000 holidays that can be celebrated in this heterogeneous country, we have one particular version of this one holiday shoved down our throats all the time. In the most saccharin form."

The idea of a Philadelphia Krampuslauf in Philadelphia originated with Amber Dorko Stopper, a mother of two with a keen taste for horror. She only recently discovered the Krampus character, and says her three-year old kids are as fascinated as she is.

"My kids got an early start with spooky things," said Stopper. "I realized really quickly how that was not popular—it's seen as suspicious behavior. Everything is so soft-pedaled with kids. You're not showing any conflict with kids at all, much less folklore."

Stopper attempted to organize the creepy procession in South Philadelphia, where she lives, but after the local merchants association agreed to back the idea, it fizzled for lack of interest among the neighbors.

Ultimately she found a kindred spirit in Janet Finegar, a member of the community organization that maintains and programs Liberty Lands Park in Northern Liberties. One of the challenges in recruiting like-minded souls was not the friction of indulging ghoulish behavior during the most wonderful time of the year, but convincing parents that a walk around the neighborhood was worthwhile.

"That seemed like a primary stumlbing block. People would say, 'and then we do what?'" said Stopper. "People have lost that whole idea of procession and being together and walking in a unit. If you've experienced it, is a really fun feeling to be out at night and having people looking from their windows and going, 'wow! That's really cool!'"

But even Stopper admits you can only push children too far.

"We have adopted kids, so we're sensitive of saying they will be taken away from home and never coming back," said Stopper. "But we did say you'll have to go to his house, eat spicy vegetables and watch boring adult TV, and then he'll bring you home."

The horror. The horror.