Santa Claus is relentlessly trying to enter our European households (mostly through our mailboxes rather than chimneys), but Father Christmas, Baby Jesus, Grandfather Frost, and other traditional gift-bringers have managed to fend him off so far (well, sort of).
Each country (or region) has its own traditional Christmas gift-bringer. Some of them are quite nice, such as the British Father Christmas, others are outright weird, such as the Catalan “defecating log”, but all of them are equally interesting. The following map shows the gift-bringers’ names with translations, coloured by relatedness of the concepts themselves (that is, not by etymological relatedness of the names).
Please note that some of the stripes and gradients may not represent the actual geographical distribution completely accurately; they just show general geographical trends. For example, Weinachtsmann is more common in the north of Germany, Christkind (or Christkindl) in the south, but the border is not entirely clear. The situation in Ukraine is even more unclear.
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