Next Monday, December 6, is the feast day of St. Nicholas.
St. Nicholas lived in the 4th century in what is now Turkey. His
legend began when he provided dowries of gold for three noble but
impoverished maidens, by dropping the treasure down the chimney as
each prepared to marry.
Next Monday, December 6, is the feast day of St. Nicholas.
St. Nicholas lived in the 4th century in what is now Turkey. His legend began when he provided dowries of gold for three noble but impoverished maidens, by dropping the treasure down the chimney as each prepared to marry.
The three bags of gold eventually morphed into the pawnbroker’s symbol of three golden orbs, and St. Nicholas or “Sinterklaas” and the chimney persist in our Santa Claus tradition to this day.
Twenty-two years ago, I had been living and working in the Netherlands since March and that first November I was beginning to be homesick for our own holiday traditions.
That year and for several years after, I learned to enjoy the Sinterklaas traditions as much as our own. It starts in early November with the arrival of Sinterklaas and the “zwarte pietjes” or Black Petes, supposedly on a ship from Spain. The Black Petes are Sinterklaas’ Moorish minions. Sinterklaas rides from the harbor to the city center, in a red robe and bishop-style mitre, on a white and gray horse.
The Black Petes are usually young guys in minstrel-y blackface and a medieval moorish costume (tights’ pantaloons and a feathered turban). The legend is that children who have been bad will be bundled into a large bag by Black Pete and taken back to Spain.
The Black Petes made me uncomfortable. They seemed crude and racist. But the Netherlands has different racial issues than we do, and are historically tolerant so I chose not to see more malice in the tradition than was really there.
It fascinated me to trace how other parts of this tradition can be seen in our own.
The Speculaas pop, for example, is a gingerbread cookie molded in the shape of Sinterklaas, from 3 to over 18 inches high. It gets its name from the speculaas, or mirrored mold in which the dough used to be pressed.
I imagine Dutch settlers in our country, unable to replicate the elaborate mold, turning out simple gingerbread men instead.
Other goodies include 4-inch chocolate letters in your initial, pastry loaves filled with almond paste, and marzipan shaped and colored to represent everything from carrots and apples to cheese sandwiches, ice cream cones, frogs and, occasionally, graphically rude subjects.
Children are encouraged to leave their shoes (occasionally still wooden) by the fireplace each night, along with some hay and a carrot for Sinterklaas’s horse. Good children will receive goodies, and bad children, coal.
Sound familiar?
After this the Dutch Sinterklaas and the American Santa Claus traditions diverge.
The big night for Sinterklaas is December 5. Families gather and await a loud rap on the door. As the door is answered, a large bag is tossed inside. Young children are dizzy with excitement, but the rest of the family knows that the best presents aren’t in the bag.
Each person has one other person as their special victim, er, recipient of the “surprise” — pronounced “sur-PREEZ-uh” and very specifically THIS surprise’ is not an ordinary everyday surprise, for which the word is “verassing.”
The gift chosen for the “surprise” must not only be appropriate but must be disguised in a misleading, inconvenient and sometimes messy way.
Think the box inside the box inside the box.
Think the box containing a note that tells you to look in the closet, where you find another note sending you to the toilet tank, where you find another note leading outside under a flower pot…
Think the box wrapped tightly and nestled in a large glass aquarium full of cooked spaghetti. Or worse. Before the “surprise” is delivered, the recipient endures a special poem. It’s written to exploit the past year’s embarrassments, or perhaps an ongoing personality flaw; preferably both.
It is so important that the poems rhyme, that special rhyming books appear in the shops along with the gingerbread and the marzipan.
I’m happy to be here with our traditions, even while I miss my dark chocolate “E” and that special feeling of having my unreasonable preferences and misguided brainstorms lovingly set to verse.
