St Nicholas

Christmas celebrations in the Netherlands begin on the last Saturday of November, when Saint Nicholas arrives via steam ship from Spain. Sound odd? Dutch Christmas traditions have melded political ideology, folklore, religion and legend into the holiday symbol of Saint Nicholas.

With its long coastlines and flowing rivers, the Netherlands has long been the patron of sailors.

In the Netherlands, Saint Nicholas (nicknamed Sinter Klass) is depicted as a tall, slender man wearing a red bishop’s robe and tall bishop’s hat. He carries a bishop’s miter and rides a white horse. His helper, Black Peter, who is garbed in the Renaissance fashion of puffed velvet breeches, rides alongside Saint Nicholas on a mule, his face covered in soot. Black Peter’s 16th Century clothing is a reminder of the Spanish dominion over the Netherlands, which finally ended in 1570. Black Peter was often depicted with horns and red eyes. Dutch children were told he was the devil, whom Saint Nicholas had captured and made his servant.

Children in the Netherlands believe that Saint Nicholas arrives on December 5th (the eve of his saint day) along with Black Peter. Black Peter would jump from roof to roof, sliding up and down chimneys, leaving gifts in the little wooden shoes left by the hearth. Children would fill their shoes with hay and carrots for Saint Nicholas’s horse and Black Peter’s mule.

The idea of good fortune coming via the chimney goes back to pagan days, when people thought good spirits could travel as swiftly as smoke. It was very similar to the German holiday tradition of Heartha, Goddess of the Home. Mothers reinforced the idea of Saint Nicholas and Black Peter by cleaning out their hearths just before December 6th. They told children that cleaning it out would make it easier for Black Peter to deliver presents.

Over the course of the medieval period the legend of St Nicholas continued to develop and spread enormously, especially after the theft of his relics nd their translation to Bari in southern Italy in 1087. Indeed, the cult of St Nicholas eventually rivalled that of the Virgin Mary in many regions, to judge from church dedications. In addition to becoming the patron of sailors as part of this process, St Nicholas also became known as the patron of children. This important development was a consequence of the popular tale of his rescue from death of three children, who had been pickled for eating by an innkeeper. When combined with his reputation as a gift-giver, all the key elements were in place for the transformation of St Nicholas into the modern giver-of-gifts to children. The most significant manifestation of this, from the perspective of Santa Claus, is the Dutch Sinterklaas. Whilst Sinterklaas clearly derives from St Nicholas and his feast-day of the 6 December, he differs from the earlier portraits of St Nicholas in a number of ways, not least in his flying white horse. These differences are usually explained as a result of the legends of St Nicholas being fused in the medieval period with those of the former pagan god Wodan (the Norse Odin, who did possess a flying horse named Sleipnir), although one does have to wonder whether all of the aspects of the legend of Sinterklaas which are sometimes claimed to derive from this fusion really do so. Whatever the case may be, in the Early Modern era there were several unsuccessful attempts to stamp out the Sinterklaas tradition for religious reasons; more recently it has been attacked as a 'racialized tradition', due to Sinterklaas' companion Black Pete, but it remains nonetheless popular in Holland.