Meanings
- A companion of St. Nicholas in some Germanophone regions, with various cultural roles, including rewarding well-behaved children with gifts and punishing ill-behaved children by corporal punishment or by spiriting them away from their homes. Homologous with Krampus in other regions.
1 more example
[Describing a market scene of the 1780s] Spotted throughout the marketplace, too, were piles of greens—cedar and pine trees—awaiting purchase by the German burghers, who would dress them gaily in candles on Christmas Eve while their kinder watched—some quaking from fear of the Belsnickel Man, who was prone to seize and carry off in the dead of that very night all wee transgressors of the year just past.
1973, Samuel Redsecker II Slaymaker, Captives' Mansion: An American Family Chronicle Covering Nine Generations and Two Hundred Years in a Pennsylvania Rural Manor, Harper & Row, →ISBN, page 39
Origin
- Pennsylvania GermanBelsnickel
- EnglishBelsnickel
Borrowed from Pennsylvania German Belsnickel.
More words from Pennsylvania German
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
Belsnickel. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Belsnickel
“Belsnickel.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Belsnickel. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Belsnickel,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Belsnickel.
Source: Belsnickel on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.