It's Sinterklaas !

[doc_bean]

Yes, that's right, the most awesome day of the year when you're a kid in Belgium or the Netherlands (and perhaps some other places too). In the night of the 5th to the 6th december, a lovable Turk and his black helpers break into the houses of all the little children (preferably through the chimney) and leave a bunch of presents if the kid has been good that year. The bad children they take with them in a big back. Probably so they can have workers in the sweatshops used to make all the toys. They leave especially nice stuff if you make a nice drawing of Sinterklaas, or leave a carrot or some sugar for his horse (his black helpers have to walk though, but then Sinterklaas is probably to old to walk all over Belgium and the Netherlands, so I'm sure it's not racist).

Behold, it's Sinterklaas !

[Andres]

Sinterklaas Kapoentje,
leg wat in mijn schoentje,
Leg wat in mijn Laarsje,
Dank u Sinterklaasje !!!

I've been good this year, very good

I already received an advance on my presents: M2TW

Off course, since I've been really, really very very good this year, the Old scrooge still owes me big time.

I allowed him to give my presents at regular intervals. Still waiting for my brand new high end PC

I wonder what's he waiting for? Christmas?

Oh, and don't forget the CHOCOLATE. Those of us who have been good, get HUGE PILES OF CHOCOLATE from Sinterklaas...

And mandarins...

[doc_bean]

Oh, and don't forget the CHOCOLATE. Those of us who have been good, get HUGE PILES OF CHOCOLATE from Sinterklaas...

Oh yeah, I bought chocolate yesterday to give to someone, turns out it would be a bad idea to do so (misunderstanding yesterday, and giving it now would cause a lot of trouble because of other people not getting anything ).

We now have three huge, high quality choclate figures all to ourselves, and a bunch of chocolate we got from other people.

Still, the main chocolate holiday for me was always easter, Sinterklaas is more about the presents (*cough*PStwo !*cough*).

[Andres]

Still, the main chocolate holiday for me was always easter.

Yup fellow Orgah's. In Belgium we have CHOCOLATE Easter Eggs. Add to that the given fact that Belgian Chocolate is the best in the world and you should all envy us.

Not to mention the beer... Leffe, Duvel, Westmalle, you name it, we have it.

Ah, besides of the absurd politics, the bad weather and our petty "communautaire" quarrels, we live in a little paradise...

[Sasaki Kojiro]

We celebrate this one too, just for fun. I once got a can of reddi-whip lol

[Adrian II]

(..) so I'm sure it's not racist).

Just to nip any misunderstanding in the bud: the helpers are not a racial stereotype. The original medieval tradition has it that they are young devils, blackened by the fires of hell, who have been liberated by Sinterklaas and harnessed for the good cause. Their job is to scare the kids (a little) to make the Sinterklaas threats to bad kids believable, but they also act as his court jesters poking fun at adults, teachers in school, etcetera.

And a good cause it is. Books, a wireless headset and Bordeaux tastiness for Adrian II. My kids were spoilt again. Part of the fun is that we don't just dump the gifts on the kids. We 'disguise' them in weird shapes and packaging, inside of self-made puppets or boxes, etcetera, and make little poems to go with each present. For instance my oldest (11) hates maths but he works really hard in school to keep up in math. So I gave him the computergame he wanted, but hidden inside some horrible second-hand math textbook and accompanied by a pompous poem about how Sinterklaas wanted to help him with his studies. He nearly turned green with misery - until he opened the book of course.

When it was all over the youngest (8) cried for happiness for half an hour because Sinterklaas had fulfilled his greatest wishes. Not just this time, but in previous years as well. He even remembered the big red fire-brigade truck he got four years back! Heh, what more do you want as a Dad.

[Louis VI the Fat]

OMGRACIALLYABUSIVEWTFBLACKDEVILSTHISWHATYOUTEACHYOURCHILDRENDUMBBLACKSERVANTSOBEYINGNICEWHITEMASTERA NDCHRISTIANOVERLORDTHISMUSTENDNOWNAZISKKKBLAHBLAHBLAH

[Kagemusha]

Happy Sinterklaas!We are also celebrating over here,but not Sinterklaas!

[Banquo's Ghost]

Just to nip any misunderstanding in the bud: the helpers are not a racial stereotype. The original medieval tradition has it that they are young devils, blackened by the fires of hell, who have been liberated by Sinterklaas and harnessed for the good cause. Their job is to scare the kids (a little) to make the Sinterklaas threats to bad kids believable, but they also act as his court jesters poking fun at adults, teachers in school, etcetera.

Phew.

Thanks for this heads-up Adrian. I was just cracking my knuckles for the sort of humourless anti-racist rant that Louis so beautifully parodied.

*goes to lie down in darkened room*

Oh, Happy Sinterklaas, if that's the appropriate wish .

[doc_bean]

Phew.

Thanks for this heads-up Adrian. I was just cracking my knuckles for the sort of humourless anti-racist rant that Louis so beautifully parodied.

*goes to lie down in darkened room*

Oh, Happy Sinterklaas, if that's the appropriate wish .

Well, since we usually say Sinterklaas lives in Spain (where all retired people live) it would make sense to assume that they actually represent Moorish people.

That said, I don't think any kid mistakes a "fake black" Zwarte Piet with an actual black person. They're just something different, almost magical...

It does make the whole thing seem hilariously un-PC though, which is part of why i love it

[Banquo's Ghost]

Well, since we usually say Sinterklaas lives in Spain (where all retired people live) it would make sense to assume that they actually represent Moorish people.

That said, I don't think any kid mistakes a "fake black" Zwarte Piet with an actual black person. They're just something different, almost magical...

It does make the whole thing seem hilariously un-PC though, which is part of why i love it

My abortive rant would not have been aimed at you doc - I think I know you (or at least your posting style ) well enough by now. More at religious festivals that perpetuate stereotypes, especially mediaeval ones under the banner of "tradition".

Being more rational after a nice cup of tea, I agree that the un-PCness (goodness what an awkward word, let alone concept) is quite good fun.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

All this is because I'm trying to figure out a way to respond to Prince of Poodles' thread without getting myself banned.

[Stig]

Another misunderstanding is that Sint Nicolaas is a Turk, he isn't as he's from 325, which means he's Roman


Anyway he's what you non-Dutch-speakers call Santaclaus. Sinterklaas was imported by Dutch colonists and over the years he changed into Santaclaus


Like this:
sint means saint
in other words santa
klaas is just claus, easy


And Zwarte Piet is a chimney sweeper, black of soot (dictionary). He's just a normal Dutchman. As Sinterklaas used to let Piet enter houses through chimneys

[Adrian II]

And Zwarte Piet is a chimney sweeper, black of soot (dictionary). He's just a normal Dutchman. As Sinterklaas used to let Piet enter houses through chimneys

The whole thing is folklore, so properly speaking there is no estabished truth about either the Bishop or his helpers. A few years back, medieval historian Herman Pleij did a nice book on the origins of the folklore though. Zwarte Piet (Black Peter) was originally a devil/the Devil himself. He still is in the Austrian version of the tale, where he is a horned creature from Hell named 'Krampus'. Since the Devil was associated with the Moors in the late medieval mind, Zwarte Piet came to be dressed in a fake Moorish outfit.

Sankt Nikolaus and Krampus guard

[KukriKhan]

How deliciously odd to these NorthAmerican eyes, so far removed from the original myths & legends. Our Coca Cola Santa Claus pales in comparison.

Joyous Sinterklaas Day!

Heh, what more do you want as a Dad.

Heh. Never miss an opportunity to be the hero; those chances come too few.

[Adrian II]

How deliciously odd to these NorthAmerican eyes, so far removed from the original myths & legends. Our Coca Cola Santa Claus pales in comparison.

Kukrikhan, you are being the perfect gentleman as always, but please stop bashing your own country.

Here's the deal.

We have Sinterklaas.

You guys have Philip Roth, Buick, enormous fridges, James Madison, the Lincoln Memorial, the Battle of Midway, rock 'n roll, Philip Roth, Superman, George Gershwin, Cajun cooking, Hollywood, country music, the Space Shuttle, New York, rhythm and blues, Mormons, Philip Roth, jazz, Miles Davis, Sinclair Lewis, pastrami sandwiches, John Steinbeck, Francis Ford Coppola, hip hop, F. Lloyd Wright, Hawaii, Marilyn Monroe, cowboys 'n Indians, Edward Hopper, MIT and Harvard, bourbon, Philip Roth, the Grand Canyon, Paddy's Day, baseball, Disneyland, John F. Kennedy, the M1A1 tank, Bill Gates, the First Amendment, Francis Fukuyama, Pulp Fiction, Frank Sinatra, Magnum photography, Philip Roth, the Manson Family, China Town San Francisco, Martin Luther King, hard-boiled detectives, Teddy Bears, Halloween, Philip Roth, football, UPS, etcetera etcetera etcetera...

Did I mention Philip Roth?

[yesdachi]

The whole story of Sinterklaas is fascinating to me now, thanks for bringing this one up Doc, and thanks to Adrian II for the clarification and for sharing the math book story! I always try and disguise my gifts!

[Andres]

We have Sinterklaas.

You guys have Philip Roth, Buick, enormous fridges, James Madison, the Lincoln Memorial, the Battle of Midway, rock 'n roll, Philip Roth, Superman, George Gershwin, Cajun cooking, Hollywood, country music, the Space Shuttle, New York, rhythm and blues, Mormons, Philip Roth, jazz, Miles Davis, Sinclair Lewis, pastrami sandwiches, John Steinbeck, Francis Ford Coppola, hip hop, F. Lloyd Wright, Hawaii, Marilyn Monroe, cowboys 'n Indians, Edward Hopper, MIT and Harvard, bourbon, Philip Roth, the Grand Canyon, Paddy's Day, baseball, Disneyland, John F. Kennedy, the M1A1 tank, Bill Gates, the First Amendment, Francis Fukuyama, Pulp Fiction, Frank Sinatra, Magnum photography, Philip Roth, the Manson Family, China Town San Francisco, Martin Luther King, hard-boiled detectives, Teddy Bears, Halloween, Philip Roth, football, UPS, etcetera etcetera etcetera...

Did I mention Philip Roth?

Pfuh!

We just have to ask Sinterklaas and he'll bring all that.

Who the hell is Philip Roth?

[Banquo's Ghost]

Who the hell is Philip Roth?

A wonderful, wonderful novelist.

[Husar]

I think we can trust wikipedia on this one.
We here also know this in a very similar way, except for those black guys, I know only Knecht Ruprecht, who can also be found here.

Then again, we treat this a bit like a very minor version of Christmas or a small festval for kids in anticipation of christmas(where the really big presents will come).


Well, the americans adopted Santa Claus from Saint Niclas and use him for Christmas, so we re-adopted this guy as "Weihnachtsmann" who replaced the "Christkind" to a large part and sometimes appears like a different figure from "Nikolaus". The dark side of foreign influences and globalization I say

[Stig]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas

That's for Sinterklaas in English

and Zwarte Piet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet

[IrishArmenian]

No traditions are PC. Well-known-example, to satsify the PC crowd, one would have to call American Independence day: The Date In Which The Former British (practically the most PC word ever, because no person is British, unless they happened to be English, Welsh, Scottish and North-Irish) Colonies Celebrate Their Independence from Britain, Which at the Time Would be Called the British Empire, on a Day that was the 4th of July in that timezone and According to the Gregorian Calendar. And end with the motto: humans (Don't say God or anything having to do with beliefs) save (nothing nationalist) humans!

[KukriKhan]

I shook Mr. Roth's hand after a lecture he delivered at Univ. Michigan in 1970,subject: (paraphrasing) "Responsibilities of the Artist in Difficult Political Times". I'd read Portnoy's Complaint the previous year. A kind of nervous-acting guy (I think the large crowd spooked him), "Hi", he said while shaking my hand - probably the 50th hand he'd held so far that afternoon. I imagine that his eyes cleared for a moment, fixed mine and he asked: "How'd I do?".

I told him that his point of artists fashioning alternate realities to provide a fresh look at a problem, was brilliant.

Then I woke up. :) What 19-year old me really said was something like: "Uhh, OK, uhh, I guess, uhh, good points.".

We both moved on. I've followed his writing ever since. To the best of my knowledge, he hasn't followed my career. :)

I don't mean to bash the US, though thanks for the tip that it looks that way AdrianII - I'll keep an eye out for that.

I think this will be a pretty cool place to live in about 100 more years - once we confront and reconcile with our demons of the past, embrace our legacy of being supposed old world losers who left those old worlds and 'done good' through hard work and optimism in a land of perpetual self-reinvention and opportunity, and develop myths and legends of our own to tell/teach our grandchildren that don't rely on homogenized icons created to sell product.

In the meantime, I enjoy standing slack-jawed at the relative depth of self-awareness of other cultures.

[Fragony]

Well the multicultists got their filthy ever greedy hands on this one as well, it doesn't matter these black piets are black because they clean chimney's, no omg RACIST so now we have these



Another piece of centuries old tradition down the drain just because, well why??

[Sjakihata]

That day is my birthday, that means double bonus - chricccchzching

[Adrian II]

We both moved on. I've followed his writing ever since. To the best of my knowledge, he hasn't followed my career. :)

You bet Roth followed our careers. In fact he followed all our lives, to the point where he managed to track part of mine back to Newark.

Roth taught me a great lesson about literature when I interviewed him about his what-if historic novel The Plot Against America. The book is uncannily realistic in that its protagonist is the same young Nathan we know from so many other Roth books and stories (or alternate universes, if you want). I asked Roth if it bothered him that in a book like The Plot there was always going to be a residu of disbelief in the reader's mind. In as much as literature deals with 'reality', this what-if aspect made the book slightly 'less real' than others.

Roth: 'I think it makes it much more real.'

Me: 'Pardon?'

Roth: 'You just said it yourself. The disbelief makes it more real.'

Me: '...?'

Roth: 'Part of the reality of WWII was precisely that it was all so unreal to a fourteen year old kid. Millions of kids in Europe were just like the readers of this book: deep down, they couldn't believe what was happening to the world around them.'

[KukriKhan]

So that "Six degrees to Kevin Bacon" thingee is true. We're just one degree away from Roth, LoL, both having (presumeably) shaken his hand, and spoken some words to him.

And in a Sinterklaas thread in a politics forum of a gaming website.

Kismet.

[doc_bean]

And a good cause it is. Books, a wireless headset and Bordeaux tastiness for Adrian II. My kids were spoilt again. Part of the fun is that we don't just dump the gifts on the kids. We 'disguise' them in weird shapes and packaging, inside of self-made puppets or boxes, etcetera, and make little poems to go with each present. For instance my oldest (11) hates maths but he works really hard in school to keep up in math. So I gave him the computergame he wanted, but hidden inside some horrible second-hand math textbook and accompanied by a pompous poem about how Sinterklaas wanted to help him with his studies. He nearly turned green with misery - until he opened the book of course.

Great story, Adrian, but does an 11 year old still believe in Sinterklaas ? An 8 year old still believing in him is pushing the limit here.

I just read a 'related' yet completely different story, so I thought I'd share...

ebay linky

This auction is for an EMPTY Nintendo Wii Box. just the empty box that the Wii came in. You are probably asking yourself why i'm selling an empty wii box and think im trying to scam people but here is the real reason why: I have kids that have been real bad that last couple of years, especially during Christmas time. They would yell and scream and whine every single day for some expensive present that i absolutely refuse to buy but they eventually get because their mom buys it for them. All those years i've had the idea of just buying the box of the toy but have nothing in them and giving it to my kids. Well, last Christmas, that was what i did. They had desperately wanted a nintendo GAMECUBE that i refused. They'd been misbehaving throughout the year and i was not going to give in to their demands. But, I was smarter this year. I knew my wife was going to get it for them since they were getting to be pretty cheap so i pretended to give in. I bought an actual brand new Gamecube and showed it to my wife so she wouldnt go out and buy another one. She was happy! The next day i opened it up and took out the actual system and cables and everything and donated it to the children's shelter. Put some rocks to weigh down the empty box and wrapped it neatly in wrapping paper and stuck it under the tree. My wife was so proud of me. Christmas day came and my kids were so excited, like they somehow knew they were gonna get the Gamecube. The unwrapped my present frantically. The look on their face when they see their dream toy followed by their crushed faces when they find out there was NOTHING in them and the HORRIFIED face of my wife while i laugh hysterically had beaten ANY christmas present i'd ever gotten. They cried and cried while hugging the walls like they were being tortured. Imagine that N64 kid on youtube, then imagine Jesus in Passion of the Christ.

[Scurvy]

You bet Roth followed our careers. In fact he followed all our lives, to the point where he managed to track part of mine back to Newark.

Roth taught me a great lesson about literature when I interviewed him about his what-if historic novel The Plot Against America. The book is uncannily realistic in that its protagonist is the same young Nathan we know from so many other Roth books and stories (or alternate universes, if you want). I asked Roth if it bothered him that in a book like The Plot there was always going to be a residu of disbelief in the reader's mind. In as much as literature deals with 'reality', this what-if aspect made the book slightly 'less real' than others.

Roth: 'I think it makes it much more real.'

Me: 'Pardon?'

Roth: 'You just said it yourself. The disbelief makes it more real.'

Me: '...?'

Roth: 'Part of the reality of WWII was precisely that it was all so unreal to a fourteen year old kid. Millions of kids in Europe were just like the readers of this book: deep down, they couldn't believe what was happening to the world around them.'

Its a really good book, and i found it as funny as Portnoys Complaint,

[Adrian II]

Great story, Adrian, but does an 11 year old still believe in Sinterklaas ? An 8 year old still believing in him is pushing the limit here.

Oh, I forgot to mention that. The youngest (8) still does. He is on the verge of enlightenment, but he doesn't quite want to face the truth yet. Maybe he feels that once he stops believing, he will get no more presents. So his brain is working overtime to come up with excuses and explanations for all the things that don't fit, like the fact that Sinterklaas wears different clothes on each occasion, that he is spotted in different places at the same time, ectetera. This year he has come up with the concept of real and fake Santas. To his mind, all the real Sinterklaases he meets in daily life are fake, only the one on tv is for real.
(Pretty much sums up our modern world, doesn't it? )

My oldest doesn't believe anymore, and this caused two minor additional problems for Sinterklaas evening. Firstly, kid brothers or sisters have a tendency to outsmart each other, particularly when they are mad. So we needed to convince the oldest that no matter what, he should never ridicule his younger brother's belief but allow him to work it all out for himself. Secondly, we had to co-opt him into the adult Sinterklaas conspiracy, make him buy presents for the lot of us from his pocket money ('My pocket money? But Dad!...' 'Alright son, I will contribute half the price of every present you buy for the others') and keep up the pretense on Sinterklaas evening, singing all the songs etcetera.

Of course I wouldn't be Adrian II if I hadn't played a little trick on him. I pretended to let him into the secret of the 'front door bell ringing' on Sinterklaas evening. I told him I would put out the presents in a big basket on our front doorstep after dark. Once we were done singing, my oldest would pretend to go to the bathroom, quickly walk around the back, ring the bell, and then run back in through the back door as if nothing had happened.

Meanwhile I had concocted my own little plan. We started singing at a quarter to seven, and I had a good friend calling our home by phone on the dot of seven, pretending to be Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas asked to speak to my youngest and told him to look upstairs in the master bedroom. My oldest was flabbergasted... He and his brother ran upstairs where underneath the open window they found a single present and a note saying they should go out and look in the garden shed where they might find some more. In the meantime I had gone outside and moved the lot from our doorstep into the garden shed.

My youngest was totally absorbed by the presents and didn't give the whole thing a second thought. My oldest needed a minute or two to figure out how royally he'd been had, then he gave me that knowing smile... won't be long before he'll be playing his own little tricks on Dad.

[King Henry V]

Krampus is scarier than Zwarte Piet.