Sinterklaas

This past weekend I celebrated my first Sinterklaas with Marnix and his family. I was in Japan last year for Christmas, see? *grin*

The whole thing is still a bit strange to me, but I'll do my best to explain it to you guys. Over here, our Santa is called Sinterklaas, and he comes from Spain with his helper, zwarte Piet (black Pete, literally). kids leave their shoes out (instead of stockings), and if they have been good, they receive candy and small toys, otherwise Sinterklaas stuffs them in his bag and takes them back with him to Spain. Now, to me Spain would be a warmer and probably sunnier place to live than Holland, but I guess to a small kid it would be scary to think that Sinterklaas is coming to take you away, no matter where the destination may be.

That's what I've heard, anyway. How it's celebrated is another story.

Everyone buys little gifts for everyone else and then is obligated to write a small poem to accompany said gift. The poem is supposed to be from Sinterklaas himself, and of course it has to rhyme. I had a horrible time with it, even if they did make allowances for me, as I wrote my poems in English, not in Dutch. It took me hours and hours to come up with 4 simple poems - let me tell you, I used up quite a bit of scratch paper!

The shopping was much easier, even if I did get suckered into buying too expensive gifts (we were only supposed to spend 10 guilders per gift) because of the euro stickers. Yes, they have to have both the euro and the guilder price, but my eyes only saw the euro price, and so I ended up spending about twice what I was supposed to. Silly me! but Marnix and Jean Paul made the same mistake, so I didn't feel so silly. :)

All it all, it was a really fun evening. The whole family, including me, sat down and played trivial pursuit together, the questions being translated to English (of course it was a Dutch version!) as necessary for me, and every time a team answered a question correctly, they were allowed to go and pick out a gift from the pile. I had a really good time, though of course I found it embarrassing that I didn't know some questions that had to do with the us. *blush* oh well, it's a big country. I can't be expected know everything... can I??