Santa's Satanic Little Helper

This is probably one of those things that everybody in the world already knows about, but I just learned it today, and I LOVE IT.

St. Nicholas, better known here as Santa Claus, has his own personal assistant who travels around with him, and it's not Rudolph . Knecht Ruprecht became a servant when St. Nick caught him trying to pickle some little kids and sell them as ham. One of the reasons Nicholas is a saint is because he found the barrel O'dead kids and resurrected them. Now Ruprecht is forever Santa's knecht (servant). In Germany, the story goes that on December 5th or 6th, St. Nick will go around to the houses making his list of who's been naughty and nice. Knecht Ruprecht, who is dressed like Santa but in dark colors, carries a stick with him and if the kids who answer the door don't perform well, he beats them with the stick. Sometimes if they're really bad, they get thrown into his sack and tossed into a river.

How can you not love that?
I wish I would have learned this story when my teenagers were little kids.
Oh, and incidentally, Bart Simpsons dog in German is Knecht Ruprecht.