It’s Christmas in Belgium!
Well, sorta. Actually, it’s just the Feast of St. Nikolaas, which is, admittedly, a lot different from Christmas. They still have regular Christmas on the 25th, but as you might have guessed from the name of the Feast, the 6th of December focuses on celebrating St. Nikolaas, who is the inspiration for our own Santa. Even so, there are some distinct differences between Christmas and this mini-Christmas-before-Christmas.
For starters, Sinterklaas (or St. Nikolaas) isn’t exactly Santa Claus. In fact, the first time I saw him, it was in this form. That’s him made of chocolate on the left.
Mmmmmmmmmmm, candy Pope!
For about a week, I actually thought Sinterklaas was the Pope. After all, Belgium is a Catholic country, and KU Leuven is pretty jazzed about Rome and the Pope in general. But when I started to notice that this image kept popping up in children’s stores, I started to wonder. Catholic or no, I’ve never met a kid who was clamoring for a Pope action figure. If it comes down to a Ninja Turtle or the Pope, a Ninja Turtle is gonna win every time. (This principle, I’m sure, holds true in the hearts of children and also for any scenario in which the Pope might actually get into a fight with a Ninja Turtle.)
Hey, it’s an honest mistake. He’s too skinny to be Santa, and you have to admit, the big pointy hat and the scepter aren’t doing a lot to differentiate him from the Pontiff. What does differentiate St. Nikolaas from both Pope and Santa, though, is his mode of transportation.
Depending on the festival you’re attending, the guy is going to be riding on one of three things:
- A white horse
- A steam boat
- Or a Train
That’s right. Sleighs be damned. Who needs pesky reindeer when you’ve got the sheer industrial power of a steam engine? St. Nikolaas doesn’t need your namby pamby, clean energy reindeer. All he needs is some coal.
Despite having what seems like ample amounts of coal to give to bad little boys and girls, St. Nikolaas also uses a different method of punishment from that of his North American cousin. What’s that, you ask?
He puts them in his bag and takes them to Spain.
But the strangest custom involved in the Belgian celebration of the feast of St. Nikolaas doesn’t have to do with St. Nikolaas so much as it has to do with his helper—Zwarte Piet. It’s widely accepted in Belgium that, being very old, St. Nikolaas would have a hard time delivering presents and candy to all the children of the world. He’d also have trouble hefting all of those fat little children onto his train. That’s where Zwarte Piet, which translates literally to “Black Peter,” comes in. He’s St. Nikolaas’ go-between from the train full of presents to your living room; sort of like an elf and Rudolph all rolled into one. Well, I guess that’s an awfully big “sort of.” See, Black Peter is, well … how to put this delicately? Black Peter is black.
As you can see from the above picture, while he is literally the color black, it’s very important to remember that the people who portray Black Peter are not actually black in the racial sense of the term. What’s most important about this tradition is that Black Peter (and in some cases, many, many Black Peters) is always portrayed by a white person in black face paint. The very character itself is a caricature of blackness.
More than anything else, Black Peter resembles the blackface characters of minstrel shows from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like the “Sambo” character of those days, Black Peter could be wearing raggedy or whimsical clothing (or some combination of the two), with a distinct afro haircut, lips painted bright red or pink, and white hands.
So how do Belgians deal with the presence of this seemingly racist character in one of their most beloved children’s feasts? On the whole, they don’t. The only people who seem to care about the obviously racial overtones of the Black Peter character are Americans. They’ve even come up with numerous stories to wash the racism off of the character.
Originally, Black Peter was a character necessary to the plot of the St. Nikolaas children’s story. It seemed unfeasible that an elderly old man would be able to deliver all those presents. So when St. Nikolaas became too feeble to disperse the bevy of citrus and chocolate from aboard his holy locomotive, he got his Moroccan slave to do it for him.
Also, they make him into different forms of candy, just like they do Sinterklaas. Candy can’t be racist.
Most people are pretty shocked to learn that happy little Zwarte Piet is actually a slave. Nobody wants to get candy from an old white dude who whips a slave all the way across Europe while he chases him with a train.
So eventually the story changed.
The newest version of the story forgets the slave motif altogether, suggesting that Peter is actually just a mischievous little white guy who always finds a way to get himself turned black by jumping down chimneys. How does he keep his fancy clothes so clean if all of his skin and hair are turned black? That’s less important to most, just so long as they don’t have to deal with the fact that they’re looking at a dancing fool in blackface.
Whatever the reasoning and mythology behind the character though (some even older versions suggest that Black Peter might have originally been the devil, chained to St. Nikolaas side; others hold that St. Nikolaas actually pulled Peter, who had been a white boy, back to earth as he fell into hell, causing him to be singed black), it seems to be a widely accepted part of the culture here. What we see instantly as racist, most Belgians take for granted. But then again, that’s a pretty common sentiment here. Racism, we’ve been told by many a European, is a strictly American problem.
“Black Peter? That couldn’t be racist! Here’s a picture of a Christmas decoration where we’ve hung him up by his toes.”
(Some of you baby boomers and gen-xers will remember a certain version of Een Meeny Miney Mo in which a similar practice is advocated. What’s even more distrubing, that rhyme and this windsock were inspired by what were once actual practices.)
What do you think? Just culture, or something much worse?
One thing is for sure: this Christmas-before-Christmas festival is not something we’re used to. Nothing could have prepared me for the Pope riding a steam engine while he gave out Clementine oranges with Sambo at Christmas.
Trevsey, I have never seen you look better.