Catholic Christmas customs: "Kriskins"

[muckefuck]

If you have the misfortune to speak to me in the near future, expect an interrogation about a quaint custom from my childhood.

As a child, I attended two different parochial grade schools, one in St. Louis and one in a small town an hour's drive away. At both places, I participated in a Christmas tradition called "Kriskins". (Note that this is a [infelicitously-named] "phonetic spelling"; it's not a word I ever saw written in any authoritative context, only informally by fellow students.) At the beginning of the Christmas season (which, for Catholics, is basically coterminous with Advent, the "little Lent" of four weeks preceeding Christmas Day), all of my classmates drew each other's names from a box. Whoever got your name was an anonymous benefactor, expected to furnish small, thoughful surprises[*] in the coming weeks and a modest gift right around Christmas. It may sound like a customary gift exchange as practiced in situations where there are too many individuals involved for everyone to exchange gifts with everyone else, but there are two important differences: (1) Kriskins were strictly anonymous and (2) gift exchanges oblige participants to purchase only a single gift to be exchanged on or near Christmas.

My mother is one of eight children, so it should come as no surprise that her family eventually instituted a gift exchange. It wasn't the least bit unusual, however, for my mother to tell me, "Aunt Genevieve has your name this year and needs to know what you want." It would be strictly taboo, however, for someone to tell me, "Buster is your Kriskin and wants to know what to get you." Sure, people speculated and gossiped about who had who in grade school--even trades ("I don't want Stinky Robbins; I'll trade you for Buffy") weren't unheard of--but having your Kriskin revealed to you prematurely was simply not part of the game.

My final year of college, my dorm did "Secret Santas". The term struck me as a reasonable substitution since, having spent the previous Christmas in Germany, the likelihood that "Kriskin" was, in fact, an American corruption of Christkind[&] "Christ Child" hadn't escaped me. I remember being mildly surprised, however, to find what I considered a Catholic custom in a thoroughly non-denominational environment. No one else seemed to find it remarkable, so I concluded that it was a more widespread American custom than I'd realised.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find in the course of exchanging reminiscences with monshu that he'd never heard of such a custom under any name. He was born in Michigan but raised in California, which has got me wondering if about the regional distribution of Kriskins/Secret Santas. My working hypothesis is that it's of German-American Christian origin and ubiquituous throughout the Midwest but may not have spread throughout the Coasts. I'm working from very little data here, however, so anything y'all from your own experience could tell me would be helpful.


[*] Often--but not exclusively--gifts of small value. One Kriskin's surprise was a small treasure hunt through the library stacks. One year my "gifts" were poems by Celtic authors written out by hand and illustrated, tying in with a culminating gift of an English-language book of verse by Irish authors.

[&] Intriguingly, the Christkind as gift-giver is an invention of Martin Luther's, who found old St. Niklaus and der Weihnachtsmann ("Father Christmas") too papist bzw. too secular. As such, the term is associated with Protestants, making it a little surprising to find it being used in a strongly Catholic context.

Comments

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

And I thought that Secret Santas were a deeply entrenched custom. I don't remember ever having NOT known about them.

Do you still have the illustrated poems? That's such a lovely idea.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

No, I gave the poems away! That was the entire point. I never had my doubts about the idea, but my roommate did. He was dating a close friend of the benefactee who reported that she went looking for her little surprise and found only "some song lyrics from Bob Dylan". (Actually, a poem from Dylan Thomas--the girlfriend's mistake, I suspect.) So he counselled me to give up the idea in favour of something more traditional, like candy. But I persevered. My reward was a great big hug in front of everyone.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

Oh, I misunderstood: I thought that you had been the recipient.

It's a fabulous story.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see--awkward phrasing on my part. I've noticed when writing this that the lack of clear terminology for the two roles in the exchange makes writing about it a challenge. I'm not sure how we got around it in speech beyond "Whose name do you have?"