In our coal-less age, old threats ring hollow
Naughty kids may still deserve a lump of coal in their Christmas stockings, but try finding one
Is someone in your life on the naughty list? Good luck finding a lump of genuine coal in Toronto.
The shift away from coal over the past half-century means telling misbehaving minors they’ll get a lump instead of a Furby may be a hard threat to follow through on.
“These traditions come and go — I think it’s already faded,’’ said Heather Evans, a literature professor and expert in Christmas traditions at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
“I think it’s now something that happens more in our collective mythology than it actually happens in people’s stockings or people’s homes. ”
She suggests that the sheer popularity of coal in the past led to it being a popular material with which to threaten miscreants. The lumpy black rocks certainly wouldn’t bring a smile to a child’s face.
But receiving coal is far from the worst fate that could befall one on the naughty side of the ledger.
In Austria, St. Nicholas travels with Krampus, a devil with horns clad in chains. Krampus’s job is to punish bad children by hitting them with a stick and, in some tellings, carting them off to hell in a sack.
In parts of Germany and Switzerland — and preserved in Pennsylvania German folk traditions — a dirty, tattered, fur-clad figure called Belsnickel (Nicholas in furs) comes bearing gifts — and a switch with which to beat bad children, or at least scare them into being good.
Iceland offers a wealth of warning for treacherous tots — children who don’t do their chores and consequently don’t receive new clothes before Christmas are eaten by the Yuletide Cat.
In the past, the controversial Netherlands Christmas character Black Pete would beat bad children with a switch, but that tradition faded along with corporal punishment.
Coal was once plentiful in Toronto, home to the Elias Rogers Coal & Wood Co., a massive coal-burning plant that sat right near King and Parliament Sts.
“By 1860 it took up about 40 buildings,” said Toronto historian and tour guide Bruce Bell. “All the paintings and photographs made sure they showed the burning of the coal and how black the sky was. It meant progress.”
“I haven’t been able to pinpoint the actual origins, but it appears to have been wellestablished as a tradition by the end of the 18th century and into the 19th,” Evans said.
Coal started vanishing from homes in the 1950s and 1960s, and along with it the supply of readily available coal in retail markets. Today sources are few and far between.