'SANTA' AND BLACK PETE

EXCERPT FROM EUROTRIPPING ©JR DAESCHNER

As a pre-Christmas destination, Amsterdam is certainly unique. While Scandinavian countries tout for tourism and bicker about which is the 'true' home of a mythical character, the Dutch maintain a modest silence, confident in the knowledge that they have the real thing: the original Santa Claus.

However, their Sinterklaas-his name was Americanised in New Amsterdam-dresses like Saint Nicholas, a bishop, instead of a 'jolly old elf' in the corporate colours of Coca-Cola.

Likewise, his belly tends to be of European proportions rather than an American-sized bowl of jelly, and when it comes to delivering gifts, the 'Sint' prefers a white horse to a reindeer-powered sleigh.

Far from suffering the frigid temperatures of the North Pole, he spends most of the year basking in sunny Spain. Come November, he fires up his steamboat to travel to the Low Countries, arriving three weeks before 5th December, the eve of his feast day.

For children throughout the Netherlands-and parts of Belgium and Luxembourg-the arrival of Sint Nicolaas is a thrilling event celebrated with songs, sweets and processions. For adults, though, the sight of Sinterklaas and his entourage can be more disconcerting and, in its own way, shocking than the hash on demand, oversexed Santa dolls and vending-machine hookers that you expect to see anyway in Amsterdam.

What you don't expect to see is hundreds of white Hollanders blacked up like Sinterklaas' Moorish servants, parading in daylight through the world capital of laissez-faire liberalism.

These light-eyed Black Petes, or Zwarte Pieten, wear curly wigs, their lips made thick with make-up and their faces painted so dark it looks like they've dipped their heads in tar. Joking, capering and sometimes even mimicking black accents, they gambol along the streets and canals like human golliwogs in sixteenth-century attire. Everywhere you look, from corner shops to major department stores festoon their holiday displays with dolls and cartoons of the Sint and his grinning sambo of a helper, shinning up ropes and chimneys.

Just a few decades ago, children's books even depicted Black Pete with a broken chain around his ankle. Back then, he was still the Sint's devilish sidekick, armed with a switch and a bag to whip naughty children and bundle them off to Spain, similar to his counterparts throughout the Continent.

Nowadays, though, he's had a postmodern makeover as the kiddies' friend, the deliverer of gifts and goodies.

Even so, Christmastime in the Netherlands remains somewhat... controversial.

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