By KAREN MADORIN
Ah, Christmas! Time once again to connect present to past and share family traditions and stories. Lifetime collections of ornaments and décor combined with treasured recipes trigger memories that fill humans with longing for lost loved ones and friends and the richness they added. Every ornament I have links me to people and activities from long ago.
Setting out tiny, hand-carved egg cups that hold one red Santa and one black Santa bring Lawrence Weigel to mind. During my first years of teaching decades ago, a local resident encouraged me to invite Mr. Weigel to share stories of Volga German customs with my classes. The man possessed a wealth of information about traditions unique to this area. His stories about Christkind and Belznicklos enthralled those high school English students.
While many youngsters in Ellis County descended from Volga German settlers, few families maintained customs brought from the old country. Lawrence captured our attention as he explained how each area village in Ellis and Rush Counties represented a specific town with dialects and cultures originating hundreds of years ago in Germany before that first migration to Russia’s Volga River Region.
He explained that before WW II when automobile access made travel easier from one town to another encouraging cultures to blend, traditions and customs changed little. Following a later migration to Kansas, these families still practiced customs like their forebearers brought from Germany to Russia three hundred years earlier.
I taught young adults, and Lawrence Weigel’s stories about Christkind and Belznicklos moved teens to their seats edge. Out of nearly 130 students he spoke to each year, less than a handful had heard of characters integral to their great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ lives. Though I have a Volga German grandmother, I’d never heard these stories either.
According to our speaker, Christkind appeared in association with St. Nicholas’s Day on December 6th. A blonde youth dressed in blue and white passed outside windows where a child looking out might catch this apparition revealing a doll or carved wooden toy. Of course, this inspired prayers as well as the hope that good kids might receive the displayed object for Christmas.
Christkind’s opposite was Belznicklos whom I’ve also heard called the Black Santa. Mr. Weigel shared that during his childhood, this character scared the tar out of naughty kids. Someone clanking chains and dressed in dark clothing--perhaps a buffalo hide coat, wearing a mask, carrying a whip and a sack large enough to hold a youngster--noisily appeared to recount miscreant’s bad behaviors. Unbeknownst to targeted kiddoes, parents previously reported offenses to this creature. Lawrence shared accounts of him grabbing particularly badly behaved children, stuffing them in his bag, and carrying them onto the prairie. Watching student faces as they considered this fate let me see wheels turning in the heads of listeners who realized they’d find themselves inside Belnicklos’ sack. Lawrence explained at the end of his tale that this form of behavior modification caused more than one child to change his or her ways.
All good things end, and Lawrence Weigel took his engaging renditions of local customs with him when he passed. Thinking now of loved ones sitting around holiday tables makes me hope that someone in every family passes on their stories to fascinated listeners. Perhaps another class of students one day will listen to those tales while sitting on the edges of chairs, letting imaginations run wild.