On Saturday 4 December, at 10.30 in the morning, St Nicholas arrived by boat at Wivenhoe quay, a local first, arranged by our Rector Erwin Lammens
Pictures of the event may be accessed here
It may have been a novel thing for many Wivenhovians but I was brought up in The Netherlands where Sinterklaas celebrations of the kind I remember started some time after the second World War, though the feast of St Nicholas is of much older origin and the legends 
surrounding the festivities are based on a real historical figure, the fourth-century bishop of Myra (now in Turkey).
One of those legends tells of the Saint’s generosity towards a poor man with three daughters of marriageable age, whose chances of making a good match were nil because the father could not afford the dowries. The story has it that the father intended to put his girls to work in a brothel when he couldn’t marry them off.
Having been told of the girls’ plight, the good Saint anonymously donated the dowries – by throwing three purses of gold coins through the windows of the house in the deep of the night. There are many more legends about St Nicholas but this is the one that lies at the heart of the continental Sinterklaas tradition: the anonymous giving of gifts on the eve of his feast day – ‘Sinterklaas avond’ – which falls on 5 December.
Ah, ‘Sinterklaas’, and all the childhood memories that brings back!
Of the time when my father’s elder brother dressed up in episcopal garb to play ‘Sint’ to the gathered tribe of nephews and nieces and my then 4-year old brother twigged his identity, full beard and false eyebrows notwithstanding. While Sint was in mid-admonition about some cousinly misdemeanour committed in the past year, brother kept coyly waving at him and calling in stage whispers of ever increasing volume: “Oom Henk, oom Henk!!” No fooling some at any time…
The St Nicholas eve celebrations are in truth rollicking affairs, where the presents are not so much wrapped as encased, in an often elaborate way that either cryptically hints at the contents of the parcel, or makes a dig at some personal foible of the recipient – as do the obligatory accompanying rhymes (which the recipient has to read out loud to the assembled company before the parcel may be opened, and which not infrequently contain rather pointed comment on the recipient, all of which is expected to be taken in good part by the victim!)
Character building stuff, this… There is an absolute veto on the givers revealing themselves even when it’s all over – though I remember one celebration with 30 family members and friends, where it took the mathematical geniuses present less than 30 minutes to work it all out!
Special kinds of candy and cake are part of the Saint Nicholas celebrations; like Easter eggs, these are not generally seen outside the season. Gingerbread figures shaped like the Sint are one speciality and however innocuous that may sound, this was one of the causes of great controversy a few centuries ago. A little history explains why.
The St Nicholas feast was historically a Catholic one, with special masses, St Nicholas markets and processions and that was fine when almost all of The Netherlands was Catholic. It was still largely unproblematic in the early stages of the Reformation.
But when a third wave of reformation, Calvinism, arrived in the 1560s and quickly led to persecution of converts by the Spanish Inquisition, things began to change.
The Prince of Orange, a convert to Calvinism, declared war on Spain; iconoclasm on a grand scale led to the destruction of religious images in churches, conversion to Calvinism (voluntary or forced) marched alongside territorial gains in the war.
Time came when the public St Nicholas festivities were no longer tolerated: and in a fit of Protestant reformist zeal many towns and cities in The Netherlands issued prohibitions on the St Nicholas markets and other popular displays of veneration of the saint. Protestantism had no saints, and it was regarded as ‘popery’ and ‘idolatry’ to present the image of a saint even in gingerbread…Consequently, these gingerbread figures were forbidden.
Not only that, but the custom of children setting out their shoes became equally offensive to religious sensibilities of the city fathers. Children used to place their shoes outside the house, with some straw and a carrot for the Saint’s horse in it. In the morning they would hope to find the offerings gone and replaced with some candy, or a gingerbread saint figure, supposedly left there by St Nicholas on his nocturnal rounds.
It is recorded that the baking of gingerbread Saint Nicholas figures was forbidden as early as 1618 (in Tiel) and still banned in Utrecht in 1655. The same happened in many other towns; Dordrecht even imposed a wholesale prohibition on the celebrations in 1657, because the Reformed church condemned it as ‘a remnant of popery’, ‘tending towards superstition and idolatry’.
Amsterdam similarly tried to suppress the celebrations until things came to a head in 1663, when the local youth revolted and demanded their feast back. Eventually the city fathers relented, on condition that any celebrations would be confined to indoors.
It seems all these measures had little effect.
There is a famous oil on canvas painting by Jan Steen (himself a Catholic), now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, depicting a domestic St Nicholas eve celebration in 1663-5. It is perfectly clear from the scene pictured that supposedly Catholic imagery is present as ever at this family celebration!
The little girl is holding her gift of a doll which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a so called ‘St Jans popje’ or St John’s doll. These dolls were given in the belief that St John protected children against childhood maladies.
In the background a man points up the chimney, presumably explaining how Black Peter came into the house (Black Peter is St Nicholas’ servant who comes down the chimney to leave presents in the shoes which by this time were set by the hearth rather than outside).
On the man’s arm, the small child is clutching a Saint Nicholas gingerbread man.
The basket in the foreground of the picture contains a selection of festive fare, amongst it ‘speculaas’ (a biscuit flavoured with sweet spices), honey cake, nuts, waffles and apples.
Speculaas derives from the word for ‘mirror’ (speculum); the name indicates the method, not the recipe. The dough is placed on a wooden plank that has been carved to leave hollowed out patterns or a shape; once the biscuit is baked it will show the same pattern or shape but in mirror image .
The speculaas in the painting is decorated with traditional heart shapes but, to this day, speculaas can be bought in The Netherlands that has the image of St Nicholas on it.
So the Saint Nicholas feast went indoors, but survived as a family-and-friends celebration. The remarkable thing is that it survived in The Netherlands at all, given the reformed church’s agitation against it and the general straight-laced Protestantism that had such a hold on the population for so long after the Reformation; and equally remarkable that it disappeared in its public manifestation from other countries in Northern Europe where this Protestant zeal was not expressed quite so vehemently.
And in case anyone is still wondering about the difference between wrapping a present and ‘encasing’ it: have a look at this picture.
The wolf’s jaws were connected, in a Heath Robinson way, to his ‘innards’ (i.e. the present). The instructions for the present’s extraction were included in the accompanying rhyme and involved putting your arm inside the wolf’s mouth. But as soon as the present began to be pulled out, the jaws suddenly snapped shut on the recipient’s hand.
Imagine the reaction of a 10-year old! The present? a book by Michelle Paver, called ‘Wolf brother’.
Yes, that’s Sinterklaas too – a lot of glue, string, paint, elastic bands, imagination, hard work, agonising over the poem and pleasurable anticipation.
