By Stephen Smoot
This Christmas, a group of locals brought one of Pendleton County’s oldest traditions into one of its newest as belsnicklers, the traditional Saint Nicholas, and Krampus, the Panlike anti Santa marched alongside the community groups, volunteer emergency responders, youth organizations, and other revelers who joined the parade.
Two years over a century ago, an unamused Pendleton Times reported of this tradition that “the weird voice of the belsnickler is abroad in the land. This is a splendid way to spread both mud and diseases.”
Belsnickling and other mumming traditions have associations with the cooler and colder months, especially focusing on annual changes in the seasons or solstice. As Gerald Milnes, a folklore historian and expert at Davis and Elkins University wrote in Signs, Cures, and Witchery, those traditions in America date back centuries, perhaps even farther.
The word “mumming” comes from both ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon English. One of the minor Greek mythological divinities, Momus, held sway in that religion over mockery and satire personified. In Old English mommer, derived from the same root as miming in French, refers to frolicking in masks.
Milnes noted that “it has been proposed that the cold and dark northern European winters held such authority over human existence that, in prehistory, people sought to give assistance to powers that could influence the change to longer, lighter, and warmer days.” Such cultural imperatives that stem from humanity’s most basic fears and emotions came to America and made their way to the frontier, following it west to the forbidding mountain range that rose to their west like a series of walls.
Now imagine 200 years ago, living in a cabin on the top of one of Pendleton County’s highest ranges. Imagine the seemingly endless winter months, constantly fretting about the wood and food stored away and if it would last, enduring the last gasp of the Little Ice Age and the much colder climate of the early modern centuries. Add to this frigid and long nights under uncaring stars, punctuated by heavy snows that could lay for weeks at a time or even all winter.
Though almost all the frontier’s original more secular mindset gave way to fervent Christianity during and after the Great Awakening, the rituals and beliefs surrounding them persisted throughout. Trust in their veracity likely ranged to true belief to a “what could it hurt?” mentality.
After all, as Milnes wrote, West Virginians have traditionally had a love-fear relationship with the sometimes dark and dangerous landscape in which the people lived and died. “West Virginia tradition bearers believe that negative, satanic forces of evil still lurk in the countryside.” If anyone doubts that such aspects passed on long ago, tales of the Braxton County Monster (literally searched for in the mid 20th Century one night by West Virginia National Guardsmen) or the now famous Mothman continue to regale natives and visitors alike.
Like the belsnickle tradition before it, festivals and fun have grown up around these newer novelties.
Before one called America itself the melting pot, that metaphor would have graced early Philadelphia quite well. Original Scandinavian settlers of the Delaware Valley quickly found themselves absorbed by the British Empire and the colonies of Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Continual strife and disorder in the Holy Roman Empire pushed many of its people out of their natives homes and toward America. Most Germans disembarked in Philadelphia. They brought from the deep and dark central European forests and mountains tales of Krampus and traditions of belsnickling. These mingled with British Celtic rituals surrounding Halloween and other occasions of masked revelry and naughtiness, as well as with the boisterous Scandinavians who knew none of these traditions, but happily picked and chose which they wanted to combine and keep.
Philadelphia still has the New Years’ Day Mummers Parade that dates to this era. President George Washington himself, with the United States capital in the city, would personally officiate its commencement yearly.
Other traditions moved west with the families who carried them. The family of Mathias Jung, later Young, for example, arrived on the Loyal Judith in 1738. His eldest son moved west to get his own farm in Lancaster County and subsequent generations gradually followed available land west to the Great Valley, then up the Shanandoah.
Many saw the potential in the rich valleys to the west, such as the Van Meter family who settled Old Fields and the extraordinarily courageous and hardworking families who found homes along the three sister streams that drain the three great valleys of Pendleton County.
Milnes included the full slate of mumming traditions that he associated closely with socially sanctioned “disorder.” They came from all points of Western Civilization traditions. One was the Roman Saturnalia, which in Julius Caesar’s time was simply a time for feasting and drinking where servants and slaves were permitted to assume temporary “master” roles, but later turned into utter degradation. Christians started celebrating the Birth of Christ at the same time to counter its increasingly malevolent influence.
Other traditions include the Samhain harvest festival of the Celts, which has associations with All Saints’ Day and Halloween, as well a Fastnacht, Mardis Gras, Carnival, and other festivities to keep hearts light during the dark months.
In Britain, a recent blog described being in a pub when “a gang of bizarrely dressed fellows crashed into the bar unannounced” in the garb of “Father Christmas, another as St. George as they had a dragon in tow. There was also a doctor, a horse, and a man in drag.” They had come to put on a “bizarre, bawdy, and unhinged” rendition of the classic story of St. George and the Dragon, also associated with these traditions of disorder, but also birth and renewal.
As practiced in Pendleton County tradition, belsnickling loosely resembles trick-or-treating. Revelers don costumes and, as Milnes wrote start “going from house to house in masquerade, with residents guessing the belsnicklers’ identities.” He added that “sometimes treats were offered to the belsnicklers, and sometimes belsnicklers offered treats to the household.
He also reported that “somehow, against great odds, this custom has found a way to continue into the twenty-first century in West Virginia,” recounting that area resident Johnny Arvin Dahmer told him in 2002 that he had received a troupe of them around Christmas.
Milnes speculates that the tradition came down from the “wild hunt” culture of ancient Germanic peoples, which likely dovetailed with equally rambunctious traditions of the Celtic British immigrants. This includes wedding kidnappings and the Shivaree, depicted at Seneca Rocks on a West Virginia State Capitol mural.
Such traditions may in the past have been used to dispel fears and reassure the worried. They also bring a message that needs to be considerably reinforced in these way-too-serious times. Belsnickling, trick-or-treating, shivarees, and other beautiful and useful nonsense have another connecting theme.
They remind all to never take themselves so seriously as to never subject oneself to a bit of harmless ridicule and frivolity.
Let’s see a lot more belsnicklers in next year’s parade.
