Sinterklaas

Sinterklaas visiting our school
Originally uploaded by Petra Bos.

Tomorrow is a special day for us Dutch people. On the 5th of December we celebrate the birthday of Sinterklaas or Sint Nicolaas (Saint Nicholas). For a couple of years I have been promising some of my English friends to write some info about the history and tradition of Sinterklaas on my blog. This year it is actually going to happen.

Saint Nicholas lived in the 3rd-4th century A.C. and was a bishop near Myra in present-day Turkey. According to the legends the bishop spent a lot of money and dedication on improving the life of the poor people in the area. One of the legends tells the story of a poor family with three daughters. Too poor to be able to afford a dowry, these girls were doomed to remain unmarried and to be sold into slavery. One rainy night the girls came home and left their wet shoes in front of the chimney to dry. Saint Nicholas, who knew about the financial problems of this family, passed the house that night and threw some little balls of gold through the window into the family’s living room. These balls happened to land in the shoes of the daughters. Children who heard about this story started putting their shoes in front of the chimney hoping that Saint Nicholas would throw something in their shoes as well.

And that is what he still does nowadays. Some things have changed, but a lot of the present day celebration is based on the legends around the real bishop. Sinterklaas has moved his home from Turkey to Spain, for reasons unknown to me. Once a year he brings a visit to The Netherlands to celebrate his birthday. He arrives by steamship together with his white horse, Amerigo, and with his helpers; the Zwarte Pieten (Black Peters). He still wears his traditional bishop clothes and he still throws little ‘balls’ in children’s shoes, except that the balls are not made from gold anymore but from little gingerbread biscuits or mandarins, but the shoes are still in front of the chimney.

If you want to know more about the traditions around Sinterklaas in The Netherlands, I can recommend this online course. More background info regarding Saint Nicholas’ celebrations around the world can be found on this site.

So what about Sinterklaas and Santa Claus, how do they relate? When Dutch and German immigrants moved to New Amsterdam (New York) they kept hanging on to their traditional Sinterklaas celebrations. In 1882 Professor Clement Clark Moore, wrote a poem about the celebrations called ‘A visit from Saint Nicholas’ but it is better known as ‘Twas the night before Christmas’. He described a white bearded man wearing red clothes with a big belly arriving by sleigh and accompanied by reindeer shortly before Christmas. This poem became very well known and became the first ‘Americanised’ description of Saint Nicholas. In 1931 Coca Cola started using the figure described in the poem for its commercials, calling him Santa Claus and drawing him like our present day Santa Claus. I guess you know the rest of the story…