The 11 Most Unintentionally Creepy Christmas Ornaments

Ah, Christmas. The time of year when we celebrate the emergence of the terrified infant from the alien cocoon.

According to the product description, this ornament is supposed to be a baby peeking out from a blanket. It was made in Germany, so maybe over there a baby in a blanket looks like an insect larva filled with the shiny half-formed offspring of a T-1000.

They also want us to think the gaping red mouth is actually a pacifier. Yeah, nice try, Germany.

But why, please, we're asking, why does Santa have tapered, footless animal legs? These are apparently reproductions of ornaments that first appeared in the 1940s. Did Santa have the torso of a fucking hairy starfish back then? If so, "The Night Before Christmas" contains some glaring omissions.

We thought we'd find out what happened if we animated him. You're welcome.

Wait, is this even a Christmas decoration? If you just saw it in passing, you'd certainly think it was. There's a kid, a bag, a man in red clothes with a white beard -- all the usual suspects. But a second glance reveals the terrified kid getting stuffed into the sack, and that the guy doing it is just some dude in a robe.

You can find reproductions of this old-timey Christmas image around the Web, and nobody seems to know the origin of it. The site where we saw this particular ornament thought it was German (again!) because part of their Santa mythology supposedly involves him kidnapping children. Of course that's ridiculous -- their Santa leaves the kidnapping to a horrifying Christmas demon.

Ah, the screaming terror of an infant that has been kidnapped by a lunatic and hung from a tree like a shrieking little trophy. This is apparently a traditional type of ornament that we had just missed before now.

This one was sold in a now-closed Etsy sale, but has fortunately been preserved at Regretsy, the archive of Etsy's greatest horrors. The description said it would be "a special keepsake for anyone with a special baby in their lives, or as a reminder of the Holy Infant ..."

So take your pick: that screeching, bound, dangling baby is either your kid or Jesus.

For each second you spend looking at this, some new horror will reveal itself. The product description says it's a snowman holding a stocking. Bullshit. Since when do snowmen have facial features, or rosy cheeks? Or legs? No, this is some kind of malformed offspring of an antiques-store orgy. It has the hat and collar of some kind of old-timey clown and the candy buttons of a gingerbread man, and it's not carrying a stocking -- it's carrying a boot that we're 100 percent sure still has a severed foot inside.

Same here -- you have to look at this one for a few seconds to get the full effect. Sure, oversize decorations are nothing new, but then you see that Santa has seized a car and is about to pounce on it.

In other words, this isn't a case where they made their Santa bigger so you could see it from the highway -- they are actually depicting Santa as being a giant who can pluck cars off the street and (presumably) eat the squishy people inside after peeling the roof off like the lid on a can of peanuts.

This appears to be a car dealership, one that decided that it'd be a good idea to market their cars as mouth-watering festive snacks to their gargantuan Santzilla. The lesson here: Be good or Santa will fucking eat you and everyone you love, and not even the Army can stop him! Merry Christmas, kids! Buy a fucking car!

Oh, look at this little showoff! Sure, Party Girl, juggling is cool, especially when you're doing it just to spell the word "party." But seriously, anyone could juggle if we all had a single, circular arm that stretched from one shoulder to the other. Get over yourself, kid.

Actually, the blob-like torso melting into the party banner makes us think the shape-shifting monster from The Thing got confused at a children's birthday party.

On the surface, including this precious little bauble on a list of disturbing Christmas decorations might seem like an odd choice. After all, it's just an ornament with little bird legs. But allow us to point a few things out.

For one thing, look at those goddamned legs. They will end you, make no mistake about that. If it's not already an unwritten law that Christmas ornaments shouldn't have talons, it most certainly should be. But there's something else.

As adorable as this may look while it's standing (and while you're certifiably insane), that's going to completely fall apart when you hang it on the tree and realize that, thanks to that hook placement that we're guessing is supposed to look like a nose or something, it's now laying on its back. That is, it now looks like a dead bird, hanging by its beak.

Remember that Orphan movie from a few years ago? The one where the little girl was really a middle-aged prostitute who refused to remove the ribbon from around her neck because she was hiding a scar related to her past and also spoiler alert? This isn't really like that. The ribbon is just to hide the fact that "Joy" here doesn't have a neck. It's a design choice made purely out of necessity. No human neck can support a head like that.

This tragically disfigured Santa Claus statue resides in Auckland, New Zealand. It's 66 frightening feet tall and, much to plenty of children's horror, it also moves. According to this story, The Aucklander reported that "his finger struggled to keep up a pace of 27 beckons per minute or 25,920 times a day." That's right -- it's finger does a rapid, "Come over here, little girl" motion. Oh, and it winks, too.

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THAT IS NOT WINKING.

Unsurprisingly, residents of Auckland were uncomfortable with being beckoned to by something that looks like it wants your attention so it can ask if you're comfortable with being followed home. They literally performed plastic surgery to make this thing look human again. Of course, during the remodeling period, they had to cover its face ...

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We're going to guess that the unveiling involved a great deal of mirror smashing and maniacal laughter.

You can find more from Adam at Alert Level Stork! He also helped to write Four Humors, an anthology of short stories published for charity by Wordplague. His friend Kevin Axt also runs the brilliantly funny webcomic Donuts for Sharks and you should go there right now.

For more ways to blaspheme Christmas to the fullest extent, check out The 12 Most Unintentionally Disturbing Christmas Ads and 6 Real Life Supervillains of Christmas.