The 11 Most Unintentionally Creepy Christmas Ornaments
Here's the thing: Modern-day Christmas is pretty weird already. It's a conglomeration of legends involving everything from a supernatural home invader with flying pack animals to a talking snowman.
So when it comes time to make holiday decorations, the line between festive and nightmarish is razor thin. That's how we wound up with ...
Demon Santa
"He knows if you've been bad or good, but neither will save your soul."
"So, how can we give our little Santa figurine that extra little bit of flair?" "How about we stick a light inside his head? Like he's ... glowing with Christmas cheer or some shit? Just do it, I'm sure it'll look fine."
You were probably too distracted by Santa's glowing demonic eyes there to notice what he's sitting on: a tiny little house. And if you don't think a gigantic Santa whose eye sockets are burning with the fiery embers of hell itself squatting on your roof is terrifying, it's only because you haven't seen the video of it in action yet. This thing is a fully animated robot, fueled by a hatred of humanity:
Also, you can own one for just $85. Act now, supplies are limited and controlled by Satan.
Christmas Infant Comprehends the Universe's Horrors
The birth of Munch's The Scream.
Ah, Christmas. The time of year when we celebrate the emergence of the terrified infant from the alien cocoon.
According to the product description, this ornament is supposed to be a baby peeking out from a blanket. It was made in Germany, so maybe over there a baby in a blanket looks like an insect larva filled with the shiny half-formed offspring of a T-1000.
They also want us to think the gaping red mouth is actually a pacifier. Yeah, nice try, Germany.
Beast-Legged Santa
This could have all been so very jolly. From the neck up, this is a nearly flawless execution of the (as we've now learned) extremely difficult task of creating Christmas decor. The lack of hands is a little troubling, but an artistic medium like pipe cleaners or whatever those are doesn't really leave room for luxuries of that sort, so it's fine.
But why, please, we're asking, why does Santa have tapered, footless animal legs? These are apparently reproductions of ornaments that first appeared in the 1940s. Did Santa have the torso of a fucking hairy starfish back then? If so, "The Night Before Christmas" contains some glaring omissions.
We thought we'd find out what happened if we animated him. You're welcome.
Kidnapping Santa
"I'm going to grind you up into elf feed."
Wait, is this even a Christmas decoration? If you just saw it in passing, you'd certainly think it was. There's a kid, a bag, a man in red clothes with a white beard -- all the usual suspects. But a second glance reveals the terrified kid getting stuffed into the sack, and that the guy doing it is just some dude in a robe.
You can find reproductions of this old-timey Christmas image around the Web, and nobody seems to know the origin of it. The site where we saw this particular ornament thought it was German (again!) because part of their Santa mythology supposedly involves him kidnapping children. Of course that's ridiculous -- their Santa leaves the kidnapping to a horrifying Christmas demon.
So Apparently Terrified Infant Ornaments Are a Thing
Little mention is given in the Bible to the time baby Jesus' insides were liquefied and eaten by Shelob.
Ah, the screaming terror of an infant that has been kidnapped by a lunatic and hung from a tree like a shrieking little trophy. This is apparently a traditional type of ornament that we had just missed before now.
This one was sold in a now-closed Etsy sale, but has fortunately been preserved at Regretsy, the archive of Etsy's greatest horrors. The description said it would be "a special keepsake for anyone with a special baby in their lives, or as a reminder of the Holy Infant ..."
So take your pick: that screeching, bound, dangling baby is either your kid or Jesus.
"Snowman" with "Stocking"
"Guess where I'm jamming this candy cane."
For each second you spend looking at this, some new horror will reveal itself. The product description says it's a snowman holding a stocking. Bullshit. Since when do snowmen have facial features, or rosy cheeks? Or legs? No, this is some kind of malformed offspring of an antiques-store orgy. It has the hat and collar of some kind of old-timey clown and the candy buttons of a gingerbread man, and it's not carrying a stocking -- it's carrying a boot that we're 100 percent sure still has a severed foot inside.
Godzilla Santa
This Santa has killed before. No, we're not goddamn joking.
Same here -- you have to look at this one for a few seconds to get the full effect. Sure, oversize decorations are nothing new, but then you see that Santa has seized a car and is about to pounce on it.
In other words, this isn't a case where they made their Santa bigger so you could see it from the highway -- they are actually depicting Santa as being a giant who can pluck cars off the street and (presumably) eat the squishy people inside after peeling the roof off like the lid on a can of peanuts.
This appears to be a car dealership, one that decided that it'd be a good idea to market their cars as mouth-watering festive snacks to their gargantuan Santzilla. The lesson here: Be good or Santa will fucking eat you and everyone you love, and not even the Army can stop him! Merry Christmas, kids! Buy a fucking car!
Party Girl
That's a child's face embedded in a fat man's corpse.
Oh, look at this little showoff! Sure, Party Girl, juggling is cool, especially when you're doing it just to spell the word "party." But seriously, anyone could juggle if we all had a single, circular arm that stretched from one shoulder to the other. Get over yourself, kid.
Actually, the blob-like torso melting into the party banner makes us think the shape-shifting monster from The Thing got confused at a children's birthday party.
The Chimera
This is why you should never fall asleep underneath the tree.
On the surface, including this precious little bauble on a list of disturbing Christmas decorations might seem like an odd choice. After all, it's just an ornament with little bird legs. But allow us to point a few things out.
For one thing, look at those goddamned legs. They will end you, make no mistake about that. If it's not already an unwritten law that Christmas ornaments shouldn't have talons, it most certainly should be. But there's something else.
As adorable as this may look while it's standing (and while you're certifiably insane), that's going to completely fall apart when you hang it on the tree and realize that, thanks to that hook placement that we're guessing is supposed to look like a nose or something, it's now laying on its back. That is, it now looks like a dead bird, hanging by its beak.
Joy?
Oh the joy of autoerotic asphyxiation.
Remember that Orphan movie from a few years ago? The one where the little girl was really a middle-aged prostitute who refused to remove the ribbon from around her neck because she was hiding a scar related to her past and also spoiler alert? This isn't really like that. The ribbon is just to hide the fact that "Joy" here doesn't have a neck. It's a design choice made purely out of necessity. No human neck can support a head like that.
Giant Disfigured Santa
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! His droll little mouth was like a stroke victim's!
This tragically disfigured Santa Claus statue resides in Auckland, New Zealand. It's 66 frightening feet tall and, much to plenty of children's horror, it also moves. According to this story, The Aucklander reported that "his finger struggled to keep up a pace of 27 beckons per minute or 25,920 times a day." That's right -- it's finger does a rapid, "Come over here, little girl" motion. Oh, and it winks, too.
THAT IS NOT WINKING.
Unsurprisingly, residents of Auckland were uncomfortable with being beckoned to by something that looks like it wants your attention so it can ask if you're comfortable with being followed home. They literally performed plastic surgery to make this thing look human again. Of course, during the remodeling period, they had to cover its face ...
We're going to guess that the unveiling involved a great deal of mirror smashing and maniacal laughter.
You can find more from Adam at Alert Level Stork! He also helped to write Four Humors, an anthology of short stories published for charity by Wordplague. His friend Kevin Axt also runs the brilliantly funny webcomic Donuts for Sharks and you should go there right now.
For more ways to blaspheme Christmas to the fullest extent, check out The 12 Most Unintentionally Disturbing Christmas Ads and 6 Real Life Supervillains of Christmas.
