The Yule Cat, Iceland's Christmas cat

Where the Yule Cat comes from

The cat grew out of farm life. On Icelandic farms the autumn wool work and the knitting had to be finished before Christmas, and the National Museum of Iceland explains that farmers rewarded everyone who worked for them with a new garment and a pair of sheepskin shoes. Whoever got nothing new would be “devoured by the Yule Cat”, so everybody hurried to finish their share. Knitted goods were traded at the shop for Christmas supplies too, so they had to be ready in time.

The museum adds a detail we love: it was never quite clear whether the cat ate the person, or only their Christmas dinner. The saying “to be devoured by the Yule Cat” is still in use.

The poem that made it famous

The Yule Cat is first written down in Jón Árnason's 1862 collection of Icelandic folk tales, but it was Jóhannes úr Kötlum's poem “Jólakötturinn”, in his 1932 book Jólin koma (“Christmas Is Coming”), that made it every Icelandic child's favourite fright. Ingibjörg Þorbergs set the poem to music, and Björk sang it on the 1987 album of Þorbergs's Christmas songs, Hvít er borg og bær. For Christmas 2018 Reykjavík put up a lit iron Yule Cat, five metres (16 feet) tall, in a central city square.

Nobody is quite sure how old the belief is: Medievalists.net says no one knows where it comes from, and that the poem is probably what made the cat famous everywhere.

The cat's family

Since the 20th century the Yule Cat has been the pet of Grýla and the 13 Yule Lads, the ogress of the Icelandic mountains, and her thirteen sons, the Yule Lads. That makes it, by our reckoning, the cat of Krampus's cousin. It is the only one of Krampus's Kousins who checks your wardrobe instead of your behaviour, which is either kinder or much worse.