Here in Holland they have some different holiday traditions, one very important and different one being Sinterklaas. Our Santa Claus came from their Sinterklaas, who is also an old man with white hair who wears red and brings presents to children. However, Sinterklaas has his own holiday- not Christmas! His birthday is on December 6th, so he brings children presents on the eve of his birthday, and the big celebration is on the evening of the 5th. He's from Turkey (don't ask me why he's an old white guy, though!), and he now lives in Spain, so every year he comes into Holland on a boat on the middle Sunday of November.
He also has helpers like our Santa, except these guys are not elves but guys called Zwarte Pieten. Zwarte Pieten have black skin and wear really colorful clothing. Some people find this really offensive, since basically it looks as though Sinterklaas has black servants/slaves, so they've come up with the explanation that the Zwarte Pieten are black because they go down chimneys to bring presents and gets covered in soot (Sinterklaas gets his helpers to do it instead of how our Santa does it himself). But a lot of people just see it as a fun Dutch tradition!
Children can leave a shoe out before bed every evening that Sinterklaas is in the country and the next morning they find a treat from the Zwarte Pieten. But they have to leave a carrot or sugar cubes for Sinterklaas' horse, Amerigo, too! Some really traditional things that go along with Sinterklaas are chocolate letters, pepernoten, kruidnoten, speculaas, and marsepein (marzipan). If you ask Rene, pepernoten are the round ones and kruidnoten are the cubes, but up here in Leiden they do things backwards (or the other way around, but for Rene's sake I'll stick with that story). You can find the marsepein in all different shapes. My favorite are the little fruit, but they also have pigs too! Little pigs but also REALLY BIG pigs! Poems are also a big part of Sinterklaas, too!
In any case, Sinterklaas came into Leiden last Saturday!
Rene and I met up with Rosie, Mark, and Tom to head to the town square where he came into on his boat up the canals. Of course the drawbridge wouldn't open at first (something ALWAYS goes wrong to get the kids a little worried) but they got it open! It was all very exciting even though I'm 27 years old! I felt like one the little kids there- actually, Rene remarked that they had more patience than me to see Sinterklaas! He got off the boat while everyone sang Sinterklaas songs and we waited for him to go around shaking the hands of the children. The kids were really cute- many of them were dressed up like a Zwarte Piet or like Sinterklaas himself! Right at the end Rosie and I got up close to the fence in an area that didn't have a lot of people and I got to shake Sinterklaas' hand!! It was all very exciting!
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