



It’s hard to believe that another summer’s almost over. It won’t be long before the dreaded holiday season is bearing down upon us like Bill Cosby in a rutting reindeer sweater once again. After all, there are only 126 shopping days left until Christmas. Can you believe it? With that ominous deadline looming large on the horizon, what rational person has the time to think straight, much less participate in the crass commercialization of that most holy of days—Black Friday—by getting all of the family handgun Christmas shopping squared away before Santa’s annual home invasion drill down the chimney? Maybe it’s time to take a deep breath, wash a Xanax down with some of last year’s slightly expired eggnog, and think upon simpler times. More Pagan times.

An Etsy shop doing cosplay the hard way, Chaos Costumes, features a line of hooved leggings suitable for your next Pagan holiday celebration.







Shop owner, Blair Ondria, specializes in designing, fabricating, and selling a line of very unusual “custom fantasy costumes and accessories.” Most of her designs are based on creatures with hooves—from horses to fauns, creatures both real and mythical, creatures with both cloven and non-cloven hooves. In fact, the only creature with cloven hooves whose costume they don’t seem to stock is Donald Trump.

Bear in mind that the holiday season begins with Halloween (or Samhain) —and that’s only two-and-a-half months away— so get cracking if you’re looking to receive your faun hooves in time to frolic in a glen (or whatever) on October 31st. Just add horns, a tail, and a pan flute, and you’re either a satyr dreaming of nymphs, or a hirsute Zamfir ready to serenade his flock.

Halloween out of the way, we have to deal with the agony of a traditional family Thanksgiving. I suggest you score a pair of these werewolf stilts, brandish a turkey drumstick in one hand and a flagon of mead in the other, and attend your own private Bacchanalia until the alcohol and tryptophan kick in to put you out of your misery. With any luck, the synergistic effect will allow you to sleep until December 5th.





Or perhaps line the family up for the traditional holiday Osculum Infame.



December 5th (or 6th, depending on your ancestry) is Krampusnacht, on the eve of the feast of Saint Nicholas. In Alpine folklore, Saint Nicholas, who rewards good children, has an evil, devilish counterpart called Krampus , who appears on Krampusnacht to punish the children who have misbehaved. This antithesis of Saint Nicholas is a hairy beast with cloven hooves and the horns of a goat. Needless to say, a pair of cloven-hooved leggings are tailor-made for creating a Krampus costume to wear on Krampusnacht while running wild in the streets, whipping townfolk with branches, and stuffing children into gunny sacks.





“A tisket, a tasket, stuff this brat into a basket.”



That finally brings us to December 25th. On Christmas Day, you shouldn’t have any problem creating the perfect Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer costume from the various deer-like accessories that Chaos Costumes specializes in. Although, why you’d ever want to do that is beyond my comprehension—and probably none of my business. On second thought, Krampusnacht should probably be your grand finale. You should spend all of Christmas Day in the quite, reverent contemplation of the birth of your personal Lord and Savior—American Capitalism.

But seriously folks, these hooved leggings are kinda… hot?



















H/T: Fashionably Geek