The Night Before Christmas

Here in the Netherlands, there is a twofold Christmas. The first event is held on the 5th of December, and is by far the most interesting/controversial of the two. This is Sinterklaas. If you say "St Nicholas" while drunk, you'll have an idea of where the name may have come from.

Plenty has been written about this tradition, but for those of you who don't keep up with the foreign festive mores, let me summarise by saying that Sinterklaas is a old man wearing red who is definitely not Santa, who is helped by a host of cheeky black "knechten" (which is definitely not the same as the word 'slaves') called Zwarte Pieten, in an old Dutch tradition that is definitely not racist. Oh ho ho ho.

Sinterklaas comes to each house on his horse, and then sends the Zwarte Pieten down the chimney. This apparently accounts for their black faces, though goodness knows how shimmying down a chimney gives you gold hoop earrings and bright red lips too. At the bottom of the chimney, children leave out their shoes, and the Zwarte Pieten fill them with gifts. Adults, who are wise to the ways of Sinterklaas, instead celebrate by giving each other a gift, and a poem, the contents of which describe both the gift (in cryptic terms) and the person (in not so cryptic, i.e. sometimes quite cruel/hilarious terms).

My friends and I have a weird relationship with this celebration, since it is alternately hilarious and cringeful if you don't come from the Low Lands. The smiling faces of Zwarte Pieten (both real people with painted faces, and cartoons) are everywhere in the two weeks previous to the 5th of December, and you can't help but feel that a celebration in which a fat white man sends cheeky black people to deliver gifts to children is very slightly racist. But the fact that people here don't find it racist makes it weirdly hilarious, like Cards Against Humanity, but in real life. There was even a protest this year after the tradition was criticised - not for the first time - by someone who had the gall to think that dressing people up as caricatures of Africans from the 1930s might, just possibly, make people feel awkward.

And then, all of a sudden, on the 6th of December, Sinterklaas is gone, to be replaced with the traditional western model of overzealous gift buying in preparation for what used to be, for the Dutch, just a nice meal and a chance to catch up with family on the 25th.

Merry Christmas!