“The Angels” – Forget for a moment, those chubby cheeked cherbubim from the dime-store Xmas cards. Also erase the Renaissance puti, those cute winged baby heads… though frankly the thought of winged baby heads gives me the shivers. And even depictions of seraphim that we’ve grown accustomed to are too anthropomorphic and beautiful. Angels were bad-ass. These other worldly messengers are far closer to Christopher Walken’s character in The Prophecy than those feel-good bundles of fluff and hence they fit perfectly on this list of the Ten Best Christmas Monsters.
How dare I assert this?
Monsters for the purpose of this list are scary or threatening, non-humans beings.
Non-human? Check. Don’t get me started on the idea that dead people turn into angels when they die…
Threatening? Well, one of the original Christmas stories describes angels appearing to a group of shepherds and those shepherd were scared out of their wits. The first “message” that the angels had to deliver is a bit of crowd soothing. “Fear not.” This injunction suggests that the shepherds’ first reaction was to be afraid.
Shepherds have also been nerfed a bit through a couple millennia of metaphoric over-usage. Most of us have little association with real sheep, let alone career shepherds while we are inundated with sweet as spun sugar depictions of “the loving shepherd” made infamous by kitsch meisters like Holman Hunt. As I figure it, shepherds in first C Palestine were pretty rough and tumble. If chewing tobacco existed, they’d chew it. They had to be prepared to protect their flock against marauding beasts at midnight using little more than a crooked stick and a sling.
And when these angel things come along and these tough guys collapse. Imagine John Wayne weeping, and I mean the tough John Wayne like in a cowboy role not the bogus “Roman Solider at the Cross” gig he did — or am I the only one who saw that movie?
So for being non-human and scary… even if that terror is based on a misunderstanding, we at the DailyNightmare award #8 Best Christmas Monster to the Angels. Disagree? Add a comment.