Sinterklaas has arrived!

This is how the Christmas caper works over here.

December 6 is the feast of St Nicholas, the protector of children. But in the Netherlands, it's Sinterklaas' birthday and the children get to celebrate it on the eve. The roles are reversed and Sinterklaas treats the children to presents.

Every year via national broadcast, everyone can see Sinterklaas arrive in the Netherlands - somewhere different every year. This year, the real Sinterklaas arrived in Middelburg. But as he can't be in more than one place at the same time, he has stand-ins that go to the other cities to help him out. At Eindhoven, four big kids - Sjoerd, Helga, Ed and I - went along to see the Sinterklaas "Eindhoven representative". We were pretty excited.

As this is a quite important event in the Netherlands, it's important that everyone gets a good view.

Same goes for the kids. (Hard core!)

St Nicholas was a bishop before he became a saint, so we often see him dressed in his bishop threads - i.e. staff, mitre and long snowy white beard. Here's one of the Eindhoven reps. This one's a fairly believable get-up, except she forgot the beard part.
Sinterklaas and his entourage enter the Netherlands on steam boats via canal. I think Sinterklaas normally brings his trusty horse Amerigo on this day, although I never saw him. But the parade usually requires a couple of boats, because of the volume of pressies to give. So he sends a boat before him (Sinterklaas knows how to make an entrance), which has his helpers on it -they are Zwart Pieten, Black Petes. These are usually a bunch of white guys with "golliwog" paint on and it's kind of un-PC, but you have to just go with it. The first vessel we see is loaded with all the presents, or "de pakjes". Yesterday Ed said "There's the boat of pakjes, and pointed at the boat with a whole lot of presents on it as well as a whole lot of black-faced white-people on it. I heard: "There's the boat of pakis". Ed had no idea why I hissed at him and then nudged him. Hard.

Sinterklaas "and co" come from Spain. No one knows why they're based there, that's just how it is. There he keeps a record of naughty Vs nice kids in a big red book, and Zwart Pieten make presents in time for 5 December. This weekend I saw no less than 3 Sinterklaases and about 40 Zwart Pieten arrive on various canals throughout Noord-Brabant. But gee, I feel like Christmas is coming!

From this day, kids will leave a shoe by the door with some straw and a carrot in it (for Amerigo), with poems and pictures they have made thanking Sinterklaas for coming to the Netherlands. Then they also leave a wish list of what they want for his birthday; some kids even gather the junkmail from previous weeks and circle the pressies they want. Commercial, yes, but also convenient!

On 5 December work and schools shuts down early, and people get home to find that Amerigo has taken the carrot and Sinterklaas now has his beautiful pictures, and that he's left presents in or around the shoes! And with your presents he'll have left a poem about the present and why it's right for you (it usually teases you a bit about your mannerisms and habits), as well as a chocolate letter for the first letter of your first name.

This is the most important day of the Christmas period for Dutch children. I'll be flying back early from London after vising Fi and Maya, on Tuesday 5 December to get out to Uden in time to await Sinterklaas with Ed's parents, Ed, his sister, her husband and their kids!

All very different to my Aussie childhood Christmas memories (mainly centred around 25 December and something to do with a baby in a manger, a star, some shepherds and three wise men). I'm up for it, though.