Der Belsnickel: Nicholas in Furs or Hairy Devil?

An interpretation of the 19th-century rural Pennsylvania Belsnickel at the Days of the Belsnickel event at
Landis Valley Village & Farm Museum.
Jennifer MacNeill Photography

“There was a rush of noise outside that broke the silence of the winter night — a clanking of chains and a scratching at the kitchen window. Mother encouraged my brother and me to leave the dinner table to see who was outside. At the window, a ghastly masked face greeted us with an unearthly cackle. Clad in a rumpled fur overcoat, the figure carried an old gunnysack in one hand and a bundle of switches in the other. It was the Belsnickel! Much to our horror, mother proceeded to open the kitchen window, allowing the Belsnickel to place pieces of candy in a crooked line on the sill for us. My brother did his best to hide himself in my mother’s dark skirts, while the Belsnickel asked if we had been good that year. Only when we had provided sufficient evidence to the positive were we allowed to take the candy, lest the Belsnickel make use of his cruel switches.”

A Schuylkill County contact shared this memory with me, recalling the Belsnickel of her childhood in Auburn, Pennsylvania.

Today, Americans with a hunger for the bizarre have looked to Europe to find celebrations of the Christmas season featuring processions of revelers in horned devilish costumes and pyrotechnic displays. In Germany, the legendary dark servant of St. Nicholas, known as Krampus, has haunted the Christmas dreams of children for centuries, providing the counterpoise of punishment to the goodly saint’s ubiquitous generosity and benevolence. A recent American holiday horror movie features the mythological Krampus terrorizing a family that has lost the Christmas spirit. In the wake of popular American interest in European Krampus traditions, few Pennsylvanians are aware that the commonwealth is the New World point of origin of an equally legendary and fearsome figure known to the Pennsylvania Dutch as the Belsnickel.

Although interpretations of the Belsnickel have varied considerably throughout Pennsylvania, many Berks County families remember a time when the tap-tap-tapping of the Belsnickel’s birch switches against the window was a foreshadowing to the children of what was to come. Clad in furs, smeared in soot, and waving a bundle of birch switches, the Belsnickel served as both bearer of gifts and the agent of punishment in the Pennsylvania Dutch Christmas tradition. The Belsnickel typically was masked and dressed in patched and tattered clothes, sometimes carrying a whip or crowned with horns. Frequently a neighbor or member of the family would play the role of the Belsnickel and keep his identity secret from the children who were meant to be both delighted and terrified by the visitation.

Long before the development of the modern persona of Santa Claus, the Belsnickel reigned supreme in the holiday festivities of the Dutch Country. Unlike his European counterparts, the Belsnickel arrived alone, combining aspects of the saint and the demon into one memorable persona. In early Pennsylvania, it was the clandestine visit of the Grischt-Kindli, the little Christ Child, who brought gifts in the night on Christmas, unseen by the children. The Belsnickel, on the other hand, arrived in person anytime between the first week of December and Christmas Eve to prepare children for the coming of Christmas, with suggestions for behavioral modification.

A Belsnickel throws candy on the floor to tempt the children, his switches at the ready, in this image by Swiss engraver Karl Janslin from Illustrirte Zeitung, published in Leipzig, c. 1880. Collection of Patrick J. Donmoyer

Pennsylvania educator and second superintendent of the Keystone State Normal School Abraham Reeser Horne described this dichotomy of 19th-century rural Christmas visitors in his 1876 Pennsylvania German Manual: “In the Evening the Christ Child goes around to the houses and distributes the Christmas presents. The children eagerly await him. Sometimes the Belsnickel comes and terrifies the children. He throws chestnuts around, and when the children run to pick them up, he hits them with a wip.”

In a time when presents were sparingly given, the Belsnickel rewarded well-behaved children with nuts, cookies or candy, while children prone to roguery were threatened with the switches. The Belsnickel distributed the candy by throwing it across the kitchen floor, and this practice served as a test of sorts. If children practiced restraint, they were rewarded. If they were too eager or greedy in reaching for it, however, they received the Belsnickel’s wrath. Although frequently humorous for the adults in the family, this was often a frightening experience for children, who came to anticipate the Belsnickel with ambivalence and perhaps a touch of introspection.

Visits from the Belsnickel were not exclusive to rural Pennsylvania but part of a broader tradition of sinister Christmas callers proceeding from Central Europe. In the valley of the Rhine River, where many ancestors of the Pennsylvania Dutch find their origin, the Belsnickel was a central fixture of the Christmas season in the 18th and 19th centuries, although today he is better known in Pennsylvania than in his native home. A 19th-century American traveler, William Howitt, visiting the Pfalz in 1840–42, described a typical visit from the Belsnickel on Christmas Eve in his classic 1842 memoir The Rural and Domestic Life of Germany:

The Alsatian Christmas celebration in Wasgau depicted in this engraving from Illustrirte Zeitung, Leipzig, April 24, 1858, features a visit from the Belsnickel and the youthful Christ-Kindel (Christ Child), represented here by a young woman. According to tradition, the donkey is the noble steed of the Christ Child. Alsace is a German-speaking region of France from which many Pennsylvania Dutch find their ancestry, and the Wasgau region extends through Alsace and into the Palatinate in Germany.
Collection of Patrick J. Donmoyer

On that evening, all is expectation, and scarcely is tea away, when there comes a ring at the door. All exclaim, “That must be Pelznichel.” The faces of the children are filled with awful expectation. All stand silent. Presently is heard a distant and mysterious ringing of bells; a jingling of chains on the stone stairs. It becomes more distinct, — it approaches; there is a heavy accompanying tread. There is a bustle in the passage, as if some matter of great moment was occurring. Voices are heard speaking, and amongst them, one deep and strange one. That is Pelznichel. The heavy tread, the ringing bells, the clanking chains, the bustle, and the voices are at the door; every eye is fixed on it. All are rooted in silent awe. The door opens, and in stalks the strange figure of Pelznichel . . . . 

He turns to each child in rotation, and adapts his rewards to the age and character of each. The very little ones often propitiate him by addressing him in a little rhyme the moment his eyes are turned upon them, and which the nurse has taught them for the purpose. “Christ-kindschen komm ; Mach mich fromm ; Dass ich zu dir in Himmel komm.” Which is literally, “Christ-child come; make me good, that I may come to thee in heaven.”

Pelznichel talks sternly, and with menacing agitations of his rod, to those who have been stubborn, lazy, or disobedient, and commends those who have been otherwise. . . . He seldom, however, proceeds on this occasion to any actual chastisement, as it is intended rather as a means of reformation, by instilling a salutary fear. . . . He generally ends by dealing out, from his bag, nuts, apples, and little cakes, to each of them, — and throwing others on the floor; while they are busy in scrambling for them, he disappears. 

Howitt adds that the German Pelznichel “is, in fact, some servant or dependent of the family.” The adults “engage him to undertake this office, and furnish him with requisite information.” To the children, the Belsnickel was unnervingly omniscient, prefiguring the abilities of Santa Claus as described in the lyrics of a classic American favorite: “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows if you’re awake.”

Because of this dual nature of the Belsnickel as an all-seeing agent of both reward and punishment, friend and foe, there has been some disagreement about the meaning of his name. Despite his mistaken association with bells in the present day by monolingual English speakers, the derivation is from the Pennsylvania Dutch word Belz, meaning “fur” or “hide,” akin to the English word “pelts.” Nickel is a diminutive form of the name “Nicholas.”

Although many have assumed (and perhaps rightfully so) that the name is a reference to St. Nicholas, others have contended that he was equally an expression of der alt Nick, or “Old Nick,” an epithet for the Devil. German sources also point to this connotation and equate the Belsnickel with “Beel-zebub.” The Belsnickel is seen alternately as “The Furry Nick” or “The Furry Devil.”

Although Santa Claus, who evolved from the legend of St. Nicholas, has come to eclipse other traditional Christmas figures in the popular imagination of the United States and parts of Europe, he has little to do with the historic figure St. Nicholas, bishop of Myrna. This 4th-century saint, who presided over the bishopric in present-day Turkey, is the patron of sailors, merchants, repentant thieves and children. While the association with children is the common thread between the legends of Nicholas the saint and Nicholas the gift-giver, there is little else to suggest that the saint served in any direct way as a template for the impish Belsnickel.

Annual pageants in central Europe featuring the Wild Man, such as the one pictured in this 1566 woodcut after the Flemish artist Peter Bruegel the Elder, influenced the development of the Belsnickel character. Notice the use of the pinecone pants and tunic.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926

So how did the noble St. Nicholas transform in the German imagination into such a malevolent figure? There are many conflicting and complementary theories about the origins of the sinister Christmas visitors, and their manifestations are regional and diverse.

The celebrated and controversial German mythologist Jacob Grimm suggested that such frightening incarnations of the saints are echoes of pagan festivities and modeled after ancient deities and their consorts, who were personified in theatrical rituals at the time of the winter solstice. “Even in heathen times the divinity, whose appearing heralded a happy time, had at his side some merry elf or dwarf as his attendant embodying to the vulgar eye the blessings that he brought,” Grimm wrote in the classic Teutonic Mythology. “In Christian times they would at first choose some saint to accompany the infant Christ or the mother of God in their distribution of boons, but the saint would imperceptibly degenerate into the old goblin again, but now a coarser one. The Christmas plays sometimes present the Savior with His usual attendant Peter, or else with Nicholas, at other times however Mary with Gabriel, or with her aged Joseph, who, disguised as a peasant, acts the part of Knecht Ruprecht.”

Aside from Grimm’s romantic imaginings, the German Knecht Ruprecht, Robert the Servant (or his French counterpart, Père Fouettard, meaning Father whipping, or Hans Trapp in Alsace), is a mythical figure worthy of mention with an equally sinister Christian legend. In parts of rural Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries, Christmas visits from St. Nicholas, clad in bishop’s vestments and mitre, also featured a grizzled, wicked servant named Knecht Ruprecht, comparable in appearance to the Pennsylvania Belsnickel. His legend is a sinister inversion of St. Nicholas of Myrna and his patronage of children and repentant thieves into a horrific tale of holiday butchery. A criminal named Ruprecht murders three children on Christmas Eve, and the benevolent St. Nicholas miraculously resurrects them, just in time for Christmas. Ruprecht witnesses the holiday miracle and is compelled by his conscience to repent and swear fealty to the goodly saint as his bondsman and servant. While the story aims to provide context for Knecht Ruprecht as the antisaint, its moral lesson is compromised by that fact that he continues to terrorize children with his whip or switches.

Grimm on the other hand maintained that Ruprecht is a degeneration of St. Rupert of Salzburg, Austria, but he offered a much less likely possibility for the infamous Krampus as a corruption of Hieronymus, the Latin name for St. Jerome, esteemed theologian and doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, Grimm’s theories do hold true in the sense that many other saints are featured as bedraggled holiday visitors, such as St. Martin, whose feast day signals the beginning of Advent, when Belzmardi would visit with a similar effect, or Schmutzbaertel, a cruddy incarnation of St. Bartholomew.

An engraving of a Belsnickel-influenced St. Nicholas doll, complete with pinecone pants, from Godey’s Lady’s Book, December 1868.
Don Yoder Collection, Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center, Kutztown University

At the same time that saints and their legends were producing a new breed of legendary personae, it is also clear that such modes of holiday celebration were not in any way part of sanctioned Christian activities. As early as the 7th century, Archbishop of Canterbury Theodore of Tarsus outlawed the practices of “any who on the calends of January clothe themselves with the skins of cattle and carry heads of animals.” This decree was in response to a widespread practice in communities across Europe, when villagers donned masks and capes of fur or cross-dressed to celebrate the solstice.

These festivals originally were part of the feast of Saturnalia in the Roman world and Yule in pagan Central and Northern Europe, and these tended to become raucous parties. Such traditions carried well beyond the Middle Ages, when artists such as Peter Brueghel the Elder in Flanders depicted how these festivals transformed into the seasonal spectacle of the hunt of the Wild Man, a character who was dressed in furs with pants made of pinecones, carrying a club or an evergreen tree. The archetype of the Wild Man, ubiquitous throughout Europe, would later serve as a template for characters like the Belsnickel.

The Wild Man, as part of a cast of European bogeymen, was used to frighten naughty children and he was known by many names: Butznickel, Belzpoppel, Belzmummel, Butzeman or Butzibercht. Each of these names sheds light on the nature of the masquerade, with Mummel, Poppel and Butz all having been used interchangeably for a masked figure. These variable presentations have influenced interpretations of the Belsnickel in Europe, who appears in many forms in Odenwald, Germany, as a man in furs, a straw man like a scarecrow (Butzeman in Pennsylvania Dutch), a mummer with a pointed cap (Mummel), or a horned devil (Butziberch).

The latter is the basis of the Austrian Perchtenlauf, an annual procession in Alpine communities presided over by the Bishop St. Nicholas, who is accompanied by a cohort of terrifying woolly demons with elaborate horned masks. The procession is often associated with rites of fertility. Those who were whipped by the Perchten were assured a kind of blessing for the coming year, and farmers would ask the revelers to dance in their fields to ensure a bountiful harvest.

Although the primal intensity of the Perchtenlauf is nowhere near matched in the Pennsylvania Belsnickel, it is comparable to another tradition — belsnickeling, a collective, celebratory masquerade common in urban Pennsylvania communities of the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. This practice was a distinctly North American synthesis of the rural Belsnickel with the English practice of mumming, a form of masquerade accompanied by pageantry and theatrical street performances. The Pennsylvania Dutch adopted the practice and renamed it in the spirit of their own Christmas visitor. Characterized by disguises and gender inversion, these diversely attired “Belsnickels” took to the streets with door-to-door performances. Unlike the severe and dualistic nature of the solitary, rural Belsnickel, these masqueraders always traveled in troupes, exchanging their antics for food and drink.

Bands of Pennsylvania belsnickelers masqueraded in a variety of costumes, frequently cross-dressing and painting their faces, such as in this c. 1900 photograph.
Don Yoder Collection, Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University

Accounts of urban belsnickeling range from southeastern Pennsylvania and extend northward into Columbia, Luzerne and Lackawanna counties and westward into Perry, Snyder and Centre counties. The urban phenomenon was further enhanced by the belsnickelers’ use of the railroad to travel incognito into neighboring towns. While these festivities were typically the sport of youth, adults also participated. The Harrisburg Telegraph reported on December 26, 1879: “Bellsnickels in the most outlandish costumes were out in droves. They infested the stores and played on antique instruments as a prelude to passing round the hat, and generally departed with a parting salute on their tin horns. Some were quite proficient as musicians . . . but the majority were simply frightful. . . . We regret to say that some of them were the worse for liquor.”

Although less fearsome than the Austrian Perchenlauf, belsnickeling in Pennsylvania was an opportunity for people, especially youths, to override some of the normal rules of social order, providing a communal context for releasing social tension, exploring alternate identities, and breaking the mold of the mundane.

Despite this necessity, as time passed, collective forms of belsnickeling were largely replaced with more sanitized traditions. By the early 20th century, most Americans were expecting visits from Santa Claus, whose mythology reflected social values. In some rural communities, however, the influence of the Belsnickel was blended with the more popular notion of St. Nick in both enlivening and unsuccessful ways.

D’r alt Hansjörg (Old John George), Pennsylvania Dutch language correspondent for the weekly German newspaper Scranton Wochenblatt, described a failed attempt to assert the Belsnickel into a society largely dominated by Santa Claus. A father named Benjamin (der Bensch) attempts to play the Belsnickel, but chooses a more theatrical means to enter the house through the chimney, like Santa. He gets stuck and calls for help, but his wife does not recognize him. Instead, thinking he is a burglar, she starts a fire and tries to smoke him out. She eventually realizes her mistake and cries, “Dear God in Heaven! I believe it is Bensch, who wanted to play the Belsnickel!” With the help of the neighbors, they lower a clothesline into the chimney to extract him, but the loop catches him around the head when they proceed to pull him free. Bensch is finally lowered onto the roof, blue in the face from the rope, completely disheveled, rumpled and torn. The author remarks that it took a long time, and a half-pint of whiskey before he returned to his senses. In the end, his wife solicits a promise from Benjamin: “He swore that this would be the first and last time that he would go belsnickeling, and he begged her to tell no one. But somehow, word still got out.”

This group of belsnickelers was captured by Robert A. Swank, a photographer from Shamokin, Northumberland County, c. 1910.
Don Yoder Collection, Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University

This cautionary tale, written in a true form of distinctly Pennsylvania Dutch humor expressing the cultural value of Dummheet (stupidity), is not only meant for comic relief but to reflect the tension between the rural values of Pennsylvania Dutch identity and the increasingly homogenized American Christmas experience.

Despite these trends, the Belsnickel has never truly vanished from the region. But while some rural families in Berks County and a handful of other places continue to have visits from the Belsnickel, the rest of the nation remains largely unaware of his existence. Santa Claus has dominated the American Christmas for well over a century, prompting many Americans to seek holiday thrills from outside of the American cultural milieu.

Residents of the greater Philadelphia area have recently started their own Krampuslaaf, or Krampus parade, inspired by the dark side of European holiday traditions. This event has now been running for five years and caters to a diverse, theatrical young audience with overtones of heavy metal music and neopaganism. As with the modern European Perchtenlauf, there are pyrotechnics and hordes of demonic masks. Occasionally, if you look hard enough, a Belsnickel can be spotted among the revelers.

The Belsnickel’s story is far from over. Although his appearances are no longer commonplace in rural Pennsylvania Dutch households, he has taken on another distinctive and uncharacteristic role for one who is so unkempt and grouchy: cultural icon. As the star of numerous community celebrations, festivals and Christmas markets throughout Berks, Lebanon, Lancaster, Lehigh and Montgomery counties, the Belsnickel continues to terrify and delight thousands of Pennsylvanians each year.

In my observations, I have found that for older generations of Pennsylvania Dutch people, meeting the Belsnickel is an opportunity to again confront a figure of childhood terror who is decades later a source of amusement and nostalgia. Pennsylvania’s new generations of parents appear to find the Belsnickel to be a novel and ironically exotic experience, so foreign from the perfunctory visits with Santa Claus in shopping malls. For youths, the Belsnickel’s presence is yet again an opportunity for upending social imperatives, as well as challenging the austere arrival of a holiday fraught with social expectations. But among children, the Belsnickel seems to be something altogether different: a mythical source of wonder, an uneasy excitement, and a profound element of wildness in a seemingly tame and predictable world.

More on the Belsnickel …

The 50th anniversary edition of Alfred L. Shoemaker’s Christmas in Pennsylvania (Stackpole Books, 2009) includes the original 1959 chapter “Belsnickling,” which explores the tradition in Pennsylvania through newspaper extracts and other primary sources; a section in the new “Afterword” about recent research on the Belsnickel by folklife scholar Don Yoder; and a variety of rare prints and photographs documenting the tradition.

The Belsnickel can be found during the holiday season at various Pennsylvania historic sites and festivals. Landis Valley Village & Farm Museum in Lancaster features the Belsnickel at events in December, including Days of the Belsnickel. For information visit landisvalleymuseum.org.

The Belsnickel also arrives in person for the Christmas on the Farm event at the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University in Kutztown, Berks County. Visit kutztown.edu.

Patrick J. Donmoyer is the director of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University. He is the author of Hex Signs: Myth and Meaning in Pennsylvania Dutch Barn Stars and the forthcoming Powwowing in Pennsylvania: Braucherei and the Ritual of Everyday Life.