Is Krampus Back?

The first cold wind of the year hits in the carpark of the imaging clinic. Winter comes in sideways rain and breath that ghosts in front of your face while you stand there praying your phone won’t ring with bad news later.

~

I lock the car, check the time, and do that pointless little scan of the building I do every year, as if the bricks might tell me how this one will go. The automatic doors sigh open, and the warm, chemical-smelling air rolls out to greet me like a bored receptionist.

~

Here we are again.

Happy Krampus season.

~

When I was a kid, winter ritual meant different things.

Soup fogging the kitchen windows. My mother nagging everyone to put on slippers. Candles on the table, not for atmosphere, but because the overhead light made the room look “like an interrogation.” The closest thing to danger was slipping on black ice or burning your tongue on cocoa.

~

Even when I grew older and moved continents and lives, winter still meant familiar, harmless rites. First proper cold day: find the thick socks. First evening you can see your breath: light a candle. First week the sun clocks out at five: complain to everyone about how dark it is now, as if it didn’t happen every single year of human history.

~

Then came the year everything got divided into Before and After.

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The winter of the first lump / shadow / anomaly.

The winter I learned how quickly a human body can go from “fine” to “we need to run more tests.”

~

The memory is a blur and also painfully sharp. Sitting in another room like this, the air too warm, fluorescent lights too white, when the doctor cleared their throat in that rehearsed way that tells you they’ve had to say this too many times. The world didn’t end. It just narrowed. Suddenly my whole life was measured in millimeters and percentages and the fine print of pathology reports.

~

That winter, nothing tasted right. The rituals I used to love went thin and ghostly. I still lit the candles, but it felt less like “cozy season” and more like a vigil for the version of me who didn’t know my own cells could betray me.

~

Treatment came and went like a storm system. People were kind. People were awkward. Some disappeared. My body changed in ways I still haven’t entirely forgiven. And slowly, stupidly, stubbornly, I did the thing my doctors kept urging me to do: I kept living.

~

Then the first “all clear” came.

And with it, a new winter tradition.

~

Nobody tells you this: if you’re lucky enough to survive cancer, you don’t get to just “move on.” You get an annual date with the dark. You get a recurring appointment with your own mortality neatly printed in your calendar. You get what survivorship groups, with grim humor, call scanxiety.

~

Every winter now, around the same time the trees strip down to bone and the wind develops teeth, my phone pings with a reminder:

FOLLOW-UP. IMAGING + BLOODS. FASTING.

~

It might as well say:

IS KRAMPUS BACK?

~

As a kid, I heard the story of Krampus, the horned creature who trudges along behind Saint Nicholas in parts of Europe. Saint Nick brings treats for the good children. Krampus brings the sack. The chains. The threat of being dragged away if you’ve been bad.

~

Cancer felt a bit like that. There was the bright, clinical language of survival and remission on one side, and on the other, this shaggy, horned possibility lurking in the corner: recurrence. Metastasis. The sense that something might come back for you in the night, not because you were bad, but because biology doesn’t care about your morality at all.

~

So now winter has a new ritual.

~

First, the practical steps:

Booking the appointment months in advance. Shuffling work and life around the date like pieces on a chessboard. Pretending it’s just logistics, nothing more.

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The night before: the familiar, stupid bargaining with the universe. I’ll eat better. I’ll complain less. I’ll be more patient in traffic. Just let this one be clear, and I swear I’ll stop doomscrolling at 2 a.m.

~

The morning of: the empty stomach, the too-early alarm, the extra-long shower because you know strangers will see your body in that flimsy gown again. You dress carefully, almost formally, as if you’re meeting an ex who hurt you and you want to look unbothered.

~

Then you get here, to the clinic.

Where the real ritual happens.

~

You sign in with the receptionist who recognizes you now. There’s a script you both follow.

~

“How have you been?”

“Good, good. Just the usual check.”

~

Nobody says: “Checking if the monster’s moved back in.”

~

You sit in the waiting room with the same old magazines, the same polite posters about quitting smoking and eating more leafy greens. There’s always someone older. Sometimes someone younger. Every face holds that quiet, caged look, the one that says: I’m trying not to think about what this might show.

~

When your name is called, you go through the motions.

The gown that never quite closes at the back.

The cold table.

The technician’s practiced small talk, which somehow makes it worse because you can hear the effort to keep things neutral.

~

“Take a deep breath and hold.

You can breathe normally now.”

~

What they don’t tell you is that the breathing part doesn’t get easier.

~

Afterward comes the longest part of the ritual: waiting.

~

The world doesn’t stop for this. The world is ruthlessly normal. Emails. Groceries. Someone on social media ranting about the price of avocados like that’s the apocalypse we should be worrying about. You move through your routine like a person in a play who knows, at any moment, someone might stride onstage with a new script and rip your lines in half.

~

You pretend to be calm.

You mostly succeed with everyone except yourself.

~

There is a special kind of silence in the hours or days between test and result. Winter amplifies it. The early dark, the swallowing sky, the way the wind slips under doors. It all feels like the season itself is holding its breath with you.

~

Is Krampus back?

Is something knocking in the walls of my ribs?

Is this the year the ritual shifts from vigilance to battle again?

~

Not every winter story has a twist ending. Sometimes the phone call is short and boring.

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“Everything looks good. No concerning changes.”

~

You sag against the kitchen counter, knees watery, like someone has cut a string that’s been holding you too tight.

~

Sometimes you sit with the phone in your hand afterward and cry, quietly, at the pure unglamorous relief of getting another twelve months. This is the part nobody romanticizes. Not “carpe diem” grand gestures. Just the knowledge that you get to go back to grocery lists and school pickups and annoying meetings and soft, ordinary evenings on the couch.

~

You get another winter.

~

Over the years, my winter ritual has grown around this medical core like a ring around a tree.

~

The night after the results, I light a candle. Just one. No scented nonsense, no Pinterest-level altar, just a plain flame in a chipped glass. I turn off the overhead light and sit there for a minute, watching the thin column of fire stand up against the dark.

~

I make a simple meal. Soup, if I have the energy. Bread, if I remembered to buy it. I eat slowly, on purpose, paying attention to the boring miracle of my hands working, my throat swallowing, my body doing its job quietly.

~

Sometimes I speak out loud, not to God exactly, but to the odd council of things that got me here: surgeons, nurses, friends who showed up, dumb luck, my own cells behaving for once. I thank them all, in my own messy, half-agnostic way.

~

Then I do something that has nothing to do with illness at all.

Watch a movie with my kid.

Crawl into bed with someone warm.

Read a chapter of a book that has absolutely no “journey of resilience” in it.

~

Because the other part of the ritual is reclaiming winter from the monster.

Krampus may walk beside me, but he doesn’t get the whole season.

~

There are years, of course, when the news is not perfectly clean. A new shadow to watch. A number slightly off. A recommendation to “keep an eye on this.” Those winters are sharper. The candlelight feels less like a celebration and more like a promise made through gritted teeth: I’ll do this again. Whatever it takes. I will keep showing up.

~

But even then, the ritual holds.

~

The appointment.

The scan.

The wait.

The call.

The candle.

The quiet moment after.

~

Winter has always been the season of truth. Trees stripped down to their bones. Gardens revealing what’s actually alive under the surface. Animals choosing what to carry, what to shed.

~

My body has its own version of this now. Each year, in the darkest weeks, we go looking under the snow of skin and muscle to see what’s growing there. To count what is still mine.

~

The ritual is scary. It’s exhausting. It drags every fear I have into the light and sits me down in front of it. But it also does something else: it marks time. It says, clearly, unmistakably:

~

You are still here.

This year, you are still here.

~

When I step back out of the clinic into the cold, the air always feels different. Harsher, sometimes. Cleaner, sometimes. Either way, it bites my cheeks and reminds me that I have a face to feel it.

~

Cars slide past on wet roads. Someone hurries by with a scarf over their mouth, swearing at the temperature. The sky is the flat, undecided grey that only winter can pull off.

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I pull my coat tighter and walk toward the car, my breath trailing behind me like smoke, like a small, private comet. Somewhere in the back of my mind, Krampus trudges along, chains rattling softly. He doesn’t speak. He just watches.

~

“Not this year,” I tell him, under my breath.

~

Winter hears it.

The cold wind carries it.

And for another twelve months, that is the closest thing to a blessing I know.

.