While the aim of every holiday season is for days which are both merry and bright, beneath the surface of Christmas lurks a few truly unnerving theories and traditions.
YouTube user Dark5s has compiled a festive and freakish collection of five concepts surrounding Christmas from the past, present, and future.
Included in the assortment of holiday oddities are the always-popular demonic Christmas entity Krampus as well as the possibility of a dystopian future where Santa takes on the form of a robot determines who is naughty and nice with an exacting eye.
Perhaps the most haunted idea put forward in the video is the theory that Santa is a creation aimed at usurping the true meaning of Christmas in favor of a darker agenda.
Could Santa actually be a stand-in for the notorious idol Moloch? The similarities are somewhat unsettling and, as everyone knows, anything is possible on Christmas.
Santa aside, in other parts of the world there are a variety of 'entities' which lay claim to Christmas and are featured in the collection, including the 13 Yule Lads of Iceland.
Legend states that the judgmental trolls award good Icelandic children with toys on Christmas and leave a particularly bizarre 'gift' for the bad ones: shoes filled with rotting potatoes.
Compared to that, coal doesn't sound so bad after all.
Check out the complete video to learn more about these strange aspects of Christmas, but remember that someday they'll look back at our era and likely laugh at the Elf on a Shelf.