Belsnickel

Thanksgiving's over. Time for Christmas. And Bill Toland tells you everything about the Santa that didn't make the cut. Santa Claus, the pleasant bearded elf dressed in red (in case you thought I was referring to some other Santa Claus), was not predestined to be a worldwide Christmas icon and beloved Coca-Cola pitchman. How different our Christmases would be if the annual chimney descent of "Sinterklaas" had remained a Dutch folk custom and instead America had embraced -- and then exported to the world -- a somewhat more curious and more frightening Pennsylvania tradition. Just as Sinterklaas gets his name from the fourth-century bishop and Greek holy man, Nikolas, so does the mythic German figure known as Belsnickel (also Belznickel, or Pelznikel, or one of several other spellings). Like Sinterklaas, Santa Claus and jolly old St. Nicholas, Belsnickel brought gifts to children at Christmastime. But that's more or less where the similarities end. "Formerly, and still in all the smaller towns and villages throughout North Germany, these presents were sent by all the parents to some one fellow, who in high buskins, a white robe, a mask, and an enormous flax wig, personate Knecht Rupert, the servant Rupert. On Christmas night he goes round to every house, and says that Jesus Christ his master sent him thither, the parents and elder children receive him with great pomp of reverence, while the little ones are most terribly frightened." Whether Knecht Rupert begat Belsnickel is hard to say with certainty (Stephen Nissenbaum makes the case in his excellent book on the holidays in America, "The Battle for Christmas"); the two may have been parallel characters from different regions of old Europe -- Rupert was from Northern Germany, while Belsnickel was a Rhine province tradition. But whatever Belsnickel's origins, he, and not his Saturnalia cousins (Rupert as well as Austria's Krampus, Black Peter, and RuKlas), survived the trip across the Atlantic. He was well-known in Pennsylvania by the early 1800s -- around the same time that a "rival figure," Santa Claus, was emerging on the American Christmas landscape. ("A Visit From St. Nicholas" was published in 1822, fixing Santa's image in the American eye as the poem spread over the next few decades, though the visitor in question was never called Santa Claus in the poem.) In 1827, a Philadelphia newspaper described the Belsnickel's appearance like so: "Mr. Belsnickel [makes] his personal appearance dressed in skins or old clothes, his face black, a bell, a whip, and a pocket full of cakes or nuts; and either the cakes or the whip are bestowed upon those around, as may seem meet to his sable majesty." Meanwhile, a Morgantown, Pa., shopkeeper described the Belsnickels in his diary as "horrid frightful looking objects. ... On Christmas Eve, a few 'belsnickels' [were] prowling about this evening frightening the women and children, with their uncouth appearance -- made up of cast-off garments, [a] false face, a shaggy head of tow, or rather wig, falling profusely over the shoulders and finished out by a most patriarchal beard of whatsoever foreign [material] that could possibly be pressed into such service." Such debaucherous parading seems out of season now, more in line with Halloween or Mardi Gras. But for centuries, Christmas -- scheduled conveniently at the tail end of the harvest season, when the animals had been freshly slaughtered and the wine and beer were ready to drink -- was an excuse for public displays of merry-making, rather than an in-home, around-the-hearth holiday. It's the reason the puritans banned Christmas celebrations as soon as they arrived in North America. It's the reason the mummers continue to dance through the streets of Philadelphia. It's the reason noisy Callithumpian parades were scheduled for December, and it's why the English came up with the "Lord of Misrule," the top sot appointed to preside over the annual pagan Feast of Fools. In other words, Chr