Just in time for your Star Wars movie marathon: The Death Star popcorn maker promises to make a hefty bowl of popcorn in minutes (and it will look great next to your R2-D2 French press and Darth Vader nutcracker).
To get started, simply take off the top, which doubles as a popcorn bowl. Then, scoop in the desired amount of popcorn kernels with the included tool, turn on the device, and watch as your snack comes flying out of the air chute. The Death Star popcorn maker uses hot air to cook the kernels instead of butter or oil so it promises healthier, guilt-free popcorn.
It can hold about half a cup of unpopped kernels, which makes eight cups of cooked popcorn. You can pick one up on ThinkGeek for $50 or check out its R2-D2 branded counterpart.
Aelia Petro—the clay artist known for her draping dragon jewelry— is back with something festive for the holidays. These special ornaments come with tiny dragons hitching a ride.
Each of the colorful ornaments, which are shaped like bulbs or baubles, come with a clay dragon that’s sculpted to protect the glass items as if they’re one of the creature’s eggs. Each figure is hand sculpted with clay, then cast in resin and painted. They get a coat of varnish and are then applied to an ornament.
You can check out the whole collection on Petro’s Etsy page. With a few of these, it’ll look like Christmas in Westeros.
Though it’s officially classified as a romantic comedy, Love Actually—Richard Curtis’s intertwining tale of love and loss in London in the midst of the Christmas season—has become a staple of holiday movie marathons everywhere. Here are 23 things you might not have known about the hit 2003 film.
1. The airport opening and closing was shot with hidden cameras.
Footage of passengers being welcomed and embraced by loved ones at Heathrow Airport was shot on location with hidden cameras for a week. In the film’s DVD commentary, writer-director Richard Curtis explains that when something special was caught on camera, a crewmember would race out to have its subjects sign a waiver so the moment might be included in Love Actually. This was a fitting production device, as Curtis claims that watching the love expressed at the arrival gate of LAX is what inspired him to write the ensemble romance in the first place.
2. Four plot lines were cut from the film.
Curtis initially aimed to include 14 love stories in the film. Two were clipped in the scripting phase, but two were shot and cut in post. Those lost before production involved a girl with a wheelchair, and one about a boy who records a love song for a classmate who ultimately hooks up with his drummer. Shot but cut for time was a brief aside featuring an African couple supporting each other during a famine, and another storyline that followed home a school headmistress, revealing her long-time commitment to her lesbian partner.
3. A fifth of the movie is commonly cut from television broadcasts.
It might be of little surprise that the raciest element of this holiday movie rarely makes it on TV. The love story of John and Judy has Martin Freeman and Joanna Page playing a pair of stand-ins on an erotic drama. Their scenes have the pair mimicking sex acts, but even as simulations of simulated sex, their storyline is usually deemed too hot for TV.
4. Martine McCutcheon’s part was penned just for her.
Curtis wrote his screenplay with some stars in mind, including Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, and McCutcheon, the charismatic English ingénue best known for her role on BBC drama EastEnders. So sure was Curtis that he wanted McCutcheon for the role of the love interest to the Prime Minister that he had the character’s name as “Martine” in early drafts. Curtis explained in the DVD commentary that the name was changed to “Natalie” before McCutcheon’s audition, “so she wouldn’t get cocky.”
5. Bill Nighy didn’t realize he’d auditioned for the film.
This was the first collaboration between Nighy and Curtis, with the former playing the shameless, comeback-seeking rocker Billy Mack. On the film’s 10-year anniversary, Nighy recalled to The Daily Beast, “I did a rehearsal reading of the script as a favor to the great casting director, Mary Selway, who had been trying to get me into a film for a long time. I thought it was simply to help her hear the script aloud and to my genuine surprise I was given the job.”
6. Curtis sent request letters to his American talent.
Laura Linney, Billy Bob Thornton, and Denise Richards received letters asking them to consider a role in the film. Both actresses were impressed by the unconventional move, but Linney told The Daily Beast she was even more flattered by its contents. “I got a letter in the mail from Richard Curtis saying that he’d been trying to cast this part, and he’d kept saying to his partner, Emma Freud, that he’d been looking for a ‘Laura Linney-type,’ and she said, ‘Why don’t you ask Laura Linney?'”
7. The actors had their own trailer park village during production.
Nighy told The Guardian, “We didn’t all film together, but we had a big trailer park for all the cast. There were so many famous people in there, we used to talk about being on Liam Neeson Way or Emma Thompson Road or Hugh Grant Avenue. And it was a masterpiece of diplomacy, too; we all had the same size and type of trailer.” Linney remembered the place having a warm sense of community.
8. One scene was lifted directly from Four Weddings and a Funeral.
In Four Weddings and a Funeral, also penned by Curtis, Grant’s character Charles flirts with a woman at a wedding by mocking the terrible catering, only to discover she is the caterer. The scene was cut from the 1994 film, but was reshot nearly a decade later with Kris Marshall acting out the flirtatious faux pas. In the commentary track, Curtis admits that some drafts of the Love Actually script still had Charles’s name on portions of the scene.
9. The late Joanna was played by a real-life Curtis crush.
In the commentary, Curtis also confessed his affection and admiration for writer-director Rebecca Frayn and how it led to a heartbreaking scene in Love Actually. She’s uncredited in the film because she never has a scene to perform. But when Curtis needed images to create a slideshow of Sam’s beloved mum/Daniel’s departed wife, he turned to Frayn, asking for “all the prettiest pictures of her from her whole life.” In real-life, Frayn is married to Oscar-nominated Scottish producer Andy Harries.
10. Emma Thompson shot her crying scene 12 times.
Arguably the saddest moment in Love Actually is when Thompson’s character realizes her husband is unfaithful. In the privacy of their bedroom, she listens to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and weeps. “We decided to do it like how Mike Newell did it in Four Weddings—I shot in medium-wide, and didn’t move the camera,” Curtis recalled. “We just let it happen, and Emma walked into the room 12 times in a row and sobbed. It was an amazing feat of acting.” He also noted this was the only scene she was asked to perform that day.
11. Hugh Grant did not want to dance.
Though he and Curtis had worked together on Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, they had a deep disagreement on how the Prime Minister should be played. Grant wanted it to be a grounded performance and resented Curtis’s push to make the part more whimsical. This came to a head when shooting the dance number, which Grant refused to rehearse. “He kept on putting it off, and he didn’t like the song—it was originally a Jackson 5 song, but we couldn’t get it—so he was hugely unhappy about it,” Curtis explained. “We didn’t shoot it until the final day and it went so well that when we edited it, it had gone too well, and he was singing along with the words!” It was a tricky thing to cut, but the final result with Girls Aloud’s cover of “Jump (For My Love)” speaks for itself.
12. Real PM Tony Blair found it impossible to live up to Grant’s fictional one.
In 2005, when facing criticism for his dealings with the United States, Blair responded by saying, “I know there’s a bit of us that would like me to do a Hugh Grant in Love Actually and tell America where to get off. But the difference between a good film and real life is that in real life there’s the next day, the next year, the next lifetime to contemplate the ruinous consequences of easy applause.”
13. It took 45 minutes to pick out Aurelia’s underwear.
When the loose pages of Jamie’s in-progress novel blow into a nearby lake, Aurelia (Lúcia Moniz) is quick to strip down and dive in to rescue them. But in the DVD commentary, Curtis admits that what she wore beneath her cozy sweater was a major matter of debate that involved a lengthy meeting with his producers and 20 different sets of bras and panties to be considered.
14. Simon Pegg auditioned for the film.
Before he broke out with 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, Pegg was best known for his work on the British sitcom Spaced. It was in this stage of his career that he was eyed for the role of Rufus, the jewelry salesman in Love Actually. However, Curtis ended up casting Rowan Atkinson, who was not only a bigger star but a longtime friend from their college days; the two had previously worked together on Four Weddings and A Funeral, Mr. Bean, and Black Adder.
15. Rowan Atkinson’s character was meant to be an angel.
Rather than just an overenthusiastic gift wrapper with a good Samaritan streak at the airport, Atkinson’s Rufus was initially written as a heavenly helper in disguise. A scene was even shot were he’d evaporate after helping Sam get past security at Heathrow. “But in the end,” Curtis said in commentary, “the film turned out so sort of multiplicitous that the idea of introducing an extra layer of supernatural beings was (too much).”
16. Sarah’s apartment is based on Helen Fielding’s.
When Sarah (Laura Linney) takes her office crush Karl (Rodrigo Santoro) back to her flat, a crane shot reveals that her bedroom is perched above the first floor, with a half-wall serving as a sort of balcony. In the DVD commentary track, Curtis mentioned this layout was poached from the Bridget Jones’s Diary author’s home. To him, it seemed a charming staging place for this tender seduction scene.
17. Test audiences spurred a change to the ending of Sarah’s story.
Curtis originally intended for Sarah and Karl’s love story to fizzle out after the phone call from her brother. However, when Love Actually was screened to test audiences, the feedback begged for a clearer resolution. So Curtis provided it, creating an extra scene in reshoots that made it unmistakable that Sarah and Karl would not end up together. “Be careful what you wish for,” he warned on the DVD commentary.
18. Andrew Lincoln hand-wrote those romantic signs.
In 2013, The Walking Dead star reminisced about his climactic gesture in Love Actually with Entertainment Weekly, and revealed, “It is my handwriting! It’s funny, because the art department did it, and then I said, ‘Well, can I do it?’ because I like to think that my handwriting is really good. Actually, it ended up with me having to sort of trace over the art department’s, so it is my handwriting, but with a sort of pencil stencil underneath.”
19. The American bar scene included some improv.
Regarding the scene where three American girls (Elisha Cuthbert, January Jones, and Ivana Milicevic) flirt with Kris Marshall, Cuthbert told VH1, “It was such a creative space and we were allowed to improvise and try different things and it wasn’t just completely set into Richard’s writing. I mean we were allowed to sort of venture … It was nice that we got to sort of play around.” Curtis remembers it differently, noting in the commentary track that the Brits were “respectful” with his script, but these Americans wanted to “pep it up a bit.”
20. Bernard is a running joke based on a real man.
Every film Curtis writes contains a “Bernard,” and he’s always the butt of a joke. In Love Actually, he’s the son of Thompson’s character who is described as “horrid.” This all dates back to a love triangle that didn’t turn in Curtis’s favor. Bernard was the name of a young man who won the heart of Curtis’s crush Anne, and so he will forever be lampooned. In real life, Bernard is a successful politician, namely Bernard Jenkin, Member of Parliament for Harwich and North Essex.
21. Olivia Olson was too good for the role of Sam’s crush.
Over 200 girls auditioned for the part of Joanna, the talent show star that young Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) falls hard for. But with pipes that blew away the casting director, Olson won the part with aplomb. In the commentary track, Curtis notes that Olson sang the song “All I Want For Christmas Is You” so flawlessly that he feared it sounded manufactured. He had sound editors cut in breaths to the performance to make it more believable.
22. Sam and the other Joanna reunited on kids’ television.
Child stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Olivia Olson were utterly adorable together as drum-playing Sam and his grade school crush Joanna. But Love Actually wasn’t the end of the pair’s onscreen romance. They were reunited in 2008 when Olson joined the voice cast of the Disney Channel cartoon show Phineas and Ferb. While Brodie-Sangster lends his voice to the oft-silent Ferb, Olson often sings as Ferb’s crush, the sleek and cool Vanessa Doofenshmirtz.
23. Love Actually has been remade three times already.
The central concept of a movie packed with stars and intertwining love stories has been translated into a trio of films. The first is the Indian offering A Tribute To Love, an unofficial remake in the Hindi language. Next, Poland took a turn with Letters to St. Nicolas. The most recent version is Japan’s It All Began When I Met You, which borrows the concept as well as the film’s poster layout.
Though it’s officially classified as a romantic comedy, Love Actually—Richard Curtis’s intertwining tale of love and loss in London in the midst of the Christmas season—has become a staple of holiday movie marathons everywhere. Here are 23 things you might not have known about the hit 2003 film.
1. The airport opening and closing was shot with hidden cameras.
Footage of passengers being welcomed and embraced by loved ones at Heathrow Airport was shot on location with hidden cameras for a week. In the film’s DVD commentary, writer-director Richard Curtis explains that when something special was caught on camera, a crewmember would race out to have its subjects sign a waiver so the moment might be included in Love Actually. This was a fitting production device, as Curtis claims that watching the love expressed at the arrival gate of LAX is what inspired him to write the ensemble romance in the first place.
2. Four plot lines were cut from the film.
Curtis initially aimed to include 14 love stories in the film. Two were clipped in the scripting phase, but two were shot and cut in post. Those lost before production involved a girl with a wheelchair, and one about a boy who records a love song for a classmate who ultimately hooks up with his drummer. Shot but cut for time was a brief aside featuring an African couple supporting each other during a famine, and another storyline that followed home a school headmistress, revealing her long-time commitment to her lesbian partner.
3. A fifth of the movie is commonly cut from television broadcasts.
It might be of little surprise that the raciest element of this holiday movie rarely makes it on TV. The love story of John and Judy has Martin Freeman and Joanna Page playing a pair of stand-ins on an erotic drama. Their scenes have the pair mimicking sex acts, but even as simulations of simulated sex, their storyline is usually deemed too hot for TV.
4. Martine McCutcheon’s part was penned just for her.
Curtis wrote his screenplay with some stars in mind, including Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, and McCutcheon, the charismatic English ingénue best known for her role on BBC drama EastEnders. So sure was Curtis that he wanted McCutcheon for the role of the love interest to the Prime Minister that he had the character’s name as “Martine” in early drafts. Curtis explained in the DVD commentary that the name was changed to “Natalie” before McCutcheon’s audition, “so she wouldn’t get cocky.”
5. Bill Nighy didn’t realize he’d auditioned for the film.
This was the first collaboration between Nighy and Curtis, with the former playing the shameless, comeback-seeking rocker Billy Mack. On the film’s 10-year anniversary, Nighy recalled to The Daily Beast, “I did a rehearsal reading of the script as a favor to the great casting director, Mary Selway, who had been trying to get me into a film for a long time. I thought it was simply to help her hear the script aloud and to my genuine surprise I was given the job.”
6. Curtis sent request letters to his American talent.
Laura Linney, Billy Bob Thornton, and Denise Richards received letters asking them to consider a role in the film. Both actresses were impressed by the unconventional move, but Linney told The Daily Beast she was even more flattered by its contents. “I got a letter in the mail from Richard Curtis saying that he’d been trying to cast this part, and he’d kept saying to his partner, Emma Freud, that he’d been looking for a ‘Laura Linney-type,’ and she said, ‘Why don’t you ask Laura Linney?'”
7. The actors had their own trailer park village during production.
Nighy told The Guardian, “We didn’t all film together, but we had a big trailer park for all the cast. There were so many famous people in there, we used to talk about being on Liam Neeson Way or Emma Thompson Road or Hugh Grant Avenue. And it was a masterpiece of diplomacy, too; we all had the same size and type of trailer.” Linney remembered the place having a warm sense of community.
8. One scene was lifted directly from Four Weddings and a Funeral.
In Four Weddings and a Funeral, also penned by Curtis, Grant’s character Charles flirts with a woman at a wedding by mocking the terrible catering, only to discover she is the caterer. The scene was cut from the 1994 film, but was reshot nearly a decade later with Kris Marshall acting out the flirtatious faux pas. In the commentary track, Curtis admits that some drafts of the Love Actually script still had Charles’s name on portions of the scene.
9. The late Joanna was played by a real-life Curtis crush.
In the commentary, Curtis also confessed his affection and admiration for writer-director Rebecca Frayn and how it led to a heartbreaking scene in Love Actually. She’s uncredited in the film because she never has a scene to perform. But when Curtis needed images to create a slideshow of Sam’s beloved mum/Daniel’s departed wife, he turned to Frayn, asking for “all the prettiest pictures of her from her whole life.” In real-life, Frayn is married to Oscar-nominated Scottish producer Andy Harries.
10. Emma Thompson shot her crying scene 12 times.
Arguably the saddest moment in Love Actually is when Thompson’s character realizes her husband is unfaithful. In the privacy of their bedroom, she listens to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and weeps. “We decided to do it like how Mike Newell did it in Four Weddings—I shot in medium-wide, and didn’t move the camera,” Curtis recalled. “We just let it happen, and Emma walked into the room 12 times in a row and sobbed. It was an amazing feat of acting.” He also noted this was the only scene she was asked to perform that day.
11. Hugh Grant did not want to dance.
Though he and Curtis had worked together on Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, they had a deep disagreement on how the Prime Minister should be played. Grant wanted it to be a grounded performance and resented Curtis’s push to make the part more whimsical. This came to a head when shooting the dance number, which Grant refused to rehearse. “He kept on putting it off, and he didn’t like the song—it was originally a Jackson 5 song, but we couldn’t get it—so he was hugely unhappy about it,” Curtis explained. “We didn’t shoot it until the final day and it went so well that when we edited it, it had gone too well, and he was singing along with the words!” It was a tricky thing to cut, but the final result with Girls Aloud’s cover of “Jump (For My Love)” speaks for itself.
12. Real PM Tony Blair found it impossible to live up to Grant’s fictional one.
In 2005, when facing criticism for his dealings with the United States, Blair responded by saying, “I know there’s a bit of us that would like me to do a Hugh Grant in Love Actually and tell America where to get off. But the difference between a good film and real life is that in real life there’s the next day, the next year, the next lifetime to contemplate the ruinous consequences of easy applause.”
13. It took 45 minutes to pick out Aurelia’s underwear.
When the loose pages of Jamie’s in-progress novel blow into a nearby lake, Aurelia (Lúcia Moniz) is quick to strip down and dive in to rescue them. But in the DVD commentary, Curtis admits that what she wore beneath her cozy sweater was a major matter of debate that involved a lengthy meeting with his producers and 20 different sets of bras and panties to be considered.
14. Simon Pegg auditioned for the film.
Before he broke out with 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, Pegg was best known for his work on the British sitcom Spaced. It was in this stage of his career that he was eyed for the role of Rufus, the jewelry salesman in Love Actually. However, Curtis ended up casting Rowan Atkinson, who was not only a bigger star but a longtime friend from their college days; the two had previously worked together on Four Weddings and A Funeral, Mr. Bean, and Black Adder.
15. Rowan Atkinson’s character was meant to be an angel.
Rather than just an overenthusiastic gift wrapper with a good Samaritan streak at the airport, Atkinson’s Rufus was initially written as a heavenly helper in disguise. A scene was even shot were he’d evaporate after helping Sam get past security at Heathrow. “But in the end,” Curtis said in commentary, “the film turned out so sort of multiplicitous that the idea of introducing an extra layer of supernatural beings was (too much).”
16. Sarah’s apartment is based on Helen Fielding’s.
When Sarah (Laura Linney) takes her office crush Karl (Rodrigo Santoro) back to her flat, a crane shot reveals that her bedroom is perched above the first floor, with a half-wall serving as a sort of balcony. In the DVD commentary track, Curtis mentioned this layout was poached from the Bridget Jones’s Diary author’s home. To him, it seemed a charming staging place for this tender seduction scene.
17. Test audiences spurred a change to the ending of Sarah’s story.
Curtis originally intended for Sarah and Karl’s love story to fizzle out after the phone call from her brother. However, when Love Actually was screened to test audiences, the feedback begged for a clearer resolution. So Curtis provided it, creating an extra scene in reshoots that made it unmistakable that Sarah and Karl would not end up together. “Be careful what you wish for,” he warned on the DVD commentary.
18. Andrew Lincoln hand-wrote those romantic signs.
In 2013, The Walking Dead star reminisced about his climactic gesture in Love Actually with Entertainment Weekly, and revealed, “It is my handwriting! It’s funny, because the art department did it, and then I said, ‘Well, can I do it?’ because I like to think that my handwriting is really good. Actually, it ended up with me having to sort of trace over the art department’s, so it is my handwriting, but with a sort of pencil stencil underneath.”
19. The American bar scene included some improv.
Regarding the scene where three American girls (Elisha Cuthbert, January Jones, and Ivana Milicevic) flirt with Kris Marshall, Cuthbert told VH1, “It was such a creative space and we were allowed to improvise and try different things and it wasn’t just completely set into Richard’s writing. I mean we were allowed to sort of venture … It was nice that we got to sort of play around.” Curtis remembers it differently, noting in the commentary track that the Brits were “respectful” with his script, but these Americans wanted to “pep it up a bit.”
20. Bernard is a running joke based on a real man.
Every film Curtis writes contains a “Bernard,” and he’s always the butt of a joke. In Love Actually, he’s the son of Thompson’s character who is described as “horrid.” This all dates back to a love triangle that didn’t turn in Curtis’s favor. Bernard was the name of a young man who won the heart of Curtis’s crush Anne, and so he will forever be lampooned. In real life, Bernard is a successful politician, namely Bernard Jenkin, Member of Parliament for Harwich and North Essex.
21. Olivia Olson was too good for the role of Sam’s crush.
Over 200 girls auditioned for the part of Joanna, the talent show star that young Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) falls hard for. But with pipes that blew away the casting director, Olson won the part with aplomb. In the commentary track, Curtis notes that Olson sang the song “All I Want For Christmas Is You” so flawlessly that he feared it sounded manufactured. He had sound editors cut in breaths to the performance to make it more believable.
22. Sam and the other Joanna reunited on kids’ television.
Child stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Olivia Olson were utterly adorable together as drum-playing Sam and his grade school crush Joanna. But Love Actually wasn’t the end of the pair’s onscreen romance. They were reunited in 2008 when Olson joined the voice cast of the Disney Channel cartoon show Phineas and Ferb. While Brodie-Sangster lends his voice to the oft-silent Ferb, Olson often sings as Ferb’s crush, the sleek and cool Vanessa Doofenshmirtz.
23. Love Actually has been remade three times already.
The central concept of a movie packed with stars and intertwining love stories has been translated into a trio of films. The first is the Indian offering A Tribute To Love, an unofficial remake in the Hindi language. Next, Poland took a turn with Letters to St. Nicolas. The most recent version is Japan’s It All Began When I Met You, which borrows the concept as well as the film’s poster layout.
Susi Kenna gets crafty with her nail art. The social media director covers her nails in miniature works of art inspired by everyone from Pablo Picasso to Keith Haring.
Kenna, who works in the art world and serves as co-chair of the Junior Associates of the MoMA, uses her extensive knowledge of art to help design each set of nails. After deciding what artwork she wants to recreate next, it takes about 24 hours to create the design. Next, she finds a qualified nail artist to handpaint the creation.
You can check out all of Kenna’s manicures on her blog, Nail Art History.
Ever wonder why Santa Claus is so jolly? It might be because his hat is filled with booze. This festive hat, which is currently being sold on Amazon, has a secret flask inside for when your office party hits a lull.
Available in black, green, and red, the hat features a pouch that can hold up to 10 ounces. When you want to spike your eggnog, just grab the end of the hat and twist the secret nozzle. Just like that, you can have holiday cheer flowing right out of your headwear. After the party, the bag can be removed for easy cleaning (since we don’t all have elves to do our laundry).
If you’ve ever played a session of the classic Nintendo 64 game, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, chances are you probably ended up humming afterwards. Music is a huge aspect of the game’s story, and playing the ocarina unlocks key parts of the journey. So it’s fitting that the music from the game will soon be showcased with a two-record vinyl set.
iam8bit and Materia Collective teamed up to create Hero of Time: an hour-long arrangement based on the video game’s original soundtrack by Koji Kondo.
In January, the 64-part Slovak National Symphony Orchestra will record the music for Hero of Time, which was arranged and composed by Eric Buchholz. Buchholz is no stranger to the music from the Zelda franchise: He’s put on video game concert tours around the world including The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary Symphony.
The two 180-gram vinyls’ presentation will also pay homage to the original game, with a color scheme based on green and purple rupees and a navy sleeve designed by Ryan Brinkerhoff, which will feature what iam8bit’s store describes as:
…a die-cut Ocarina window on the jacket’s front, a majestic gatefold featuring both Light or Dark sides, and, of course – the finishing crescendo of a shimmering, gold foil-stamped triforce on the back.
You can pre-order the collector’s item on iam8bit’s online store and get sneak peek of what it will sound like with this synthesized mockup:
This isn’t the first video game soundtrack to get the vinyl treatment. iam8bit has also tackled classic games like Battletoads and Ratchet & Clank, and newer titles like No Man’s Sky, Broken Age, and Monument Valley.
Think Christmas is too commercial? Are your kids spoiled and out of control? Well, take heart: It’s Krampus season! For those who missed the Alpine folklore lesson (or the 2015 movie starring Adam Scott), Krampus is an anthropomorphic goat-ish creature who punishes misbehaving children, sometimes by throwing them in a sack and hitting them. We don’t actually condone handing your kids over to a demonic goat, but we’ll take the story as a good behavior incentive over Elf on the Shelf any day. Here are some gifts celebrating the darker side of Christmas.
Every tree needs at least one Krampus ornament to balance out all the cheery Santas and elves. This glass ornament features the lovable demon sitting on a sack of wailing children. Put this item on the tree and the rest of the ornaments are sure to stay in line.
Show up to your next sweater party in something a little different. With patterned chains and a particularly goat-y image of Krampus on the front, this get-up is sure to make fellow party guests second-guess another glass of spiked eggnog. It says gruss vom Krampus or “greetings from Krampus.”
This ominous felt stocking will give friends and family pause. Will they find small presents, or coal? If the frightened-looking children are any indication, it’s going to be coal; and at 16 inches long, this stocking can fit enough to power a tiny train.
This cotton t-shirt is great for the Scrooge in your life this holiday season—or every day if they really hate children. The design of Krampus stuffing children into his basket is professionally screenprinted onto the shirt so it can be worn for many Christmases to come.
As the holidays roll around, it’s time to break out the decorative towels and tiny soaps for the bathroom. The living room can also get a makeover with a few of these surprisingly affordable pillow cases, which fit snugly over 20-inch pillows. The linen covers feature Krampus sneaking up on some unsuspecting children, branch in hand.
This vintage-style batch of cards comes in a metal tin with Krampus’s scary mug painted on the top. There are two cards of each design, with 20 cards in total. Each menacing card comes with its own bright red envelope that says “Christmas fun.” The cards’ pictures range from Krampus chaining up crying children to the goat-demon taking a few kids on a joyride around town.
Want to really scare your grandmother this holiday? Just pop on this alarming latex mask and hide behind the tree. It has gold-painted horns and a long tongue that puts Gene Simmons to shame.
If candy canes are the official candy of Santa Claus, then these fiery cinnamon candy canes belong to Krampus. The devilish candies sport red-and-black stripes that will look great next to the Krampus ornament.
This wrapping paper sends a loud and clear message to the recipient: “OK, you get a gift this year, but watch it.” Alternatively, you can use it to wrap up some lumps of coal and call it a day. Each pack comes with two 20-by-30 inch sheets—perfect when your whole family has been up to no good.
Add an edge to your denim jacket, tote bag, girl scout uniform, or any other piece of clothing that could use a threatening yet festive touch. The digitally embroidered patch has an iron-on back for a quick application.
For something a little less permanent, jackets and accessories can be adorned with this soft enamel pin. The 1.5-inch-tall pin shows Krampus with his signature birch branches and basket of naughty children. Despite its seasonal subject matter, the simple design lets the wearer enjoy the pin all year round.
Nothing says relaxation like cuddling up near a long-tongued Christmas demon candle. The soy wax candles are handmade in a mold with eco-friendly dye. The 5-inch figures come in either red or green for the holidays.
Read up on the rich history of the child-abusing demon with this fascinating tome from author Al Ridenour. Ridenour takes an anthropological approach by visiting places in Austria to experience the Krampus festivities first-hand. Readers can dive into the complex mythology and culture that produced Santa’s spiritual foil.
Real-world, 21st century people like us will (probably) never get to experience the joy of watching a dinosaur or dragon hatch from an egg. Luckily, Firebox has the next best thing: Egg-shaped candles that reveal baby dragons and dinosaurs as they melt. Now you can become a proud reptilian parent, without the hassle of becoming Khaleesi or running a futuristic dinosaur amusement park. In fact, you can have both egg versions, because for a limited time, they’re buy one, get one half off.
Both eggs stand at 14 centimeters tall (5.5 inches) and hold small porcelain figurines inside. As the candles burn, the figures emerge dramatically from the flames, covered in black soot (don’t worry—it wipes off easily when cooled). The dragon egg randomly yields a red, green, or black baby; the dinosaur egg always gives you a Velociraptor. Once you’re done with the candle, you can hang onto the toy as a keepsake. Just add both the dragon and dinosaur egg candles to your basket and the half-off deal will activate automatically.
For more cool candles, you can also check out our list.
