12 November 2007

Sinterklaas


Nicholas was born in 270 CE (AD) in Turkey; he apparently "had a reputation for secret gift giving." He died on December 6, 343 and this date on the calendar became known as St. Nicholas Day. [Wikipedia]

Fast forward thirteen centuries to Manhattan, in New Amsterdam:

As in the home country, the Dutch children would break out in song:

Saint Nicholas, good holy man,
Put on your best coat,
Then gallop to Amsterdam...


And on the sixth of the month, the saint's feast day, they would wake to find that he had left treats for them. ...among the English, the French, the German, the Swedish families of Manhattan, pressure was brought to bear on parents; the Dutch tradition was adopted [by them, also], and, later, pushed forward a couple of weeks to align with the more generally observed festival of Christmas. So 'Sinterklaas' began his American odyssey.

...it was [in Manhattan] that American children first longed for the arrival of 'St. a Claus' (as Rivington's New Yorker Gazetteer spelled it in the early 1770s, noting that the saint's feast day would be celebrated 'by the descendants of the ancient Dutch families, with their usual festivities'). ... It was a slim fellow in a bishop's hat whose arrival the children of Dutch Manhattan looked forward to on St. Nicholas' Eve; typically, he left treats in their shoes, but occasionally ... in stockings hung from the mantelpiece. As the non-Dutch families adopted him and he gained momentum, bits of other cultural traditions stuck to the ritual; the media (Thomas Nast's cartoons in Harper's Weekly plumped the saint and whitened his beard) and corporate advertising (the white-trimmed red suit came compliments of Coca-Cola's iconic ad campaign in the 1930s) refined the image....


[Copied from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, which I highly recommend.]

And now fast forward some more to, obviously, the Hague. As is tradition, Sinterklaas arrives by boat from Spain; given the niceties of modern diplomacy, he is met by the Spanish ambassador. For some reason, which unfortunately I don't remember, Sinterklaas has to arrive well in advance of December 6; this year, it's this Saturday, as the posters proclaim around town (see photograph).

Despite his Turkish origins, Nicholas is thoroughly Europeanized; meanwhile, his assistants wear blackface. Rather than change this overly and overtly racialized tradition, their blackface is simply explained away as "soot" from the ship.

2 comments:

Uther said...

Bizarro dutchness.

Anonymous said...

Bloggin' it and bloggin' it and bloggin' it well.