Are you trapped in an office while all your friends and loved ones are hanging stockings, dreaming of sugar plums, watching Maury, and whatever else they do when they're home during the day? Us too.

While you wait for your boss to tell you to go home (and in honor of yesterday's 200th anniversary of the first publication by the Brothers Grimm) make yourself look busy by reading this collection of the 11 weirdest Grimm fairytales you've never heard of. There's lots of blood, chopping off of limbs, and even a story about a mean hedgehog boy. Enjoy.

1. The Juniper Tree
In this story, a woman decapitates her stepson by having him reach into a chest of apples and slamming the heavy lid down on his neck. And then it starts to get really gruesome.

2. Fitcher's Bird
A wizard kidnaps three sisters with plans to make each of them his bride. One by one, they discover a room in his home which houses "a great bloody basin" filled with mangled human body parts. One sister covers herself in honey and feathers and everyone who sees her thinks that she is a bird IRL.

3. Hans the Hedgehog
A man with no child is so desperate for a kid that he says he would even accept a hedgehog (random lol) for a baby. In an unbelievable coincidence, his wife soon gives birth to a boy who is half hedgehog. One day, the hedgehog is all set to marry a princess who doesn't like him, so he rips off all her clothes and "[pierces] her with his hedgehog's skin until she [bleeds] all over."

4. The Golden Key
This story, about what happens when a boy opens a mysterious box, ends abruptly when we learn that the boy hasn't actually gotten the box open yet?

5. The Girl Without Hands
She lost her hands after the Devil made her father cut them off...because she was TOO PURE AND KIND AND GOOD.

6. The King of the Golden Mountain
A snake tells a boy that he has to let twelve (and then two dozen) black men beat him, stab him, and cut off his head so that they can get married.

7. Frau Trude
A witch turns a girl into a block of wood and then sets her on fire because the girl saw her.

8. The Peasant in Heaven
A classic Mitt Romney joke.

9. The Moon
Four men steal the moon to light up their town, then insist that they be buried with it when they die. As soon as the moon is buried, every person who has ever died becomes a zombie, and all the zombies get drunk and start fighting with one another. They get so loud that St. Peter comes down from heaven and tells them all to shut up. (He also takes the moon back to heaven, where it really jazzes up the decor.)

10. The Duration Of Life
In which we learn why old people are bad at Twitter.

11. The Story of the Youth who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was
In this terrifying story, a young man tries to learn "how to shudder" through an escalating series of horrific events. (At one point, he resurrects his newly-dead cousin who then tries to strangle him. The young man is not scared by this; only annoyed.)

[Texts prepared by students at the Memorial University of Newfoundland // Image via Shutterstock]