╨╧рб▒с
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s Is Okay But St. Nicholas is the Real Thing
This year, on December 6, I celebrated St. Nicholas day. It's a
dignified celebration I have tried to import from my native Holland
for four
decades, but Santa Clausean jollity always defeated me.
This time I finally brought it off, with my whole family participating,
including the six grandchildren.
St. Nicholas -- in contrast to Santa Claus, his jovial, back-slapping,
ho-ho-ho cou
sin -- is a stately bishop with strong Calvinist
leanings. Dressed in full bishop regalia of miter, mantle and staff,
he rides the house tops on a white charger, on his way to mete out
punishments and rewards to little children. When I was a kid, he w
ould come to our school to read our misdeeds from a big red book
with gold letters. We all sang "Welcome, welcome St. Nicholas...,"
when he entered the classroom, but our heart was not in it. Maybe
because we feared his Moorish helper, Black Peter -- n
ow about to fall victim
to political correctness, I hear -- who carried a big sack for taking naughty
children to Spain. Why to Spain was never entirely clear to me, I guess it
has to do with the eighty-year Dutch war of independence that made the Spanis
h
decidedly unloved.
Later, when I was in college, a fellow student and I would dress up
as St. Nicholas and Black Peter, and go door-to-door to offer our
services to parents. They'd invite us in to read the children's criminal file
to them, an
d when that was over, we retired to the kitchen to collect our fee
plus a glass of Dutch gin. Then we went on our way to the next customer, the
way becoming less and less steady as the night wore on. Often we'd meet
another St-Nicholas and his helper. Thi
s sometimes resulted in gin-blurred
fights for territory at which the saints laid about mightily with their golden
staffs.
For adults the custom is to exchange presents at night when the
children have gone to bed. Gifts are supposed to come from
St.
Nicholas and should bear a rhymed message humorously exposing the
recipient's character flaws. So on St. Nicholas day, Holland is awash
in critical poems with limping meter and crippled rhyme. At our
recent gathering the poetry was of poor qualit
y though. Only my son-in-law,
Clif, an engineer like myself, had come up with truly ugly stuff. His
gorgeous, halting and sputtering St. Nicholas poetry was a feast for the ear.
One person was missing at our celebration, St. Nicholas himself. Th
e
children didn't particularly care, but I will rectify that situation
next year. If I can only rent a bishop somewhere.
At Random - Adrian Korpel
