The death of Saint Nicholas traditions
What secularisation hollowed out, activism finished off
This essay explores how the ancient Sinterklaas tradition was shaped by both Christian saints and pre-Christian winter spirits. Over time, commercial standardisation hollowed it out. More recently, multicultural reform stripped it of its remaining meaning. By removing what was once strange, wild, and dangerous, we lost the very things that made the tradition worth preserving.
The global war on tradition rarely announces itself as such. It comes cloaked in good intentions: inclusion, multiculturalism, and progress. But across the West, local folk customs, from the Gaelic Halloween to Carnival to Christmas, are being critiqued, censored, edited, softened, or erased to fit globalised morals. What began as organic, often ancient rituals are increasingly reinterpreted through ideological frameworks imported from elsewhere.
In the Netherlands, a cultural conflict centers on the Saint Nicholas Feast and especially his helper(s): Black Pete. Every year there are people protesting for and against black Pete. The feast is still there, but the tradition: as it was lived, feared, remembered, is being systematically dismantled.
The streets used to be decorated with Saint Nicholas scenes, and children where somewhat afraid when Saint Nicholas came: because he came to judge both the good and the bad kids. At least… that was the case when I grew up in the early 2000s. Bad children don’t exist anymore.
This piece is about what happens to cultures when they are told they may no longer remember themselves.
Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker
Nicholas of Myra was a fourth-century bishop in what is now Turkey. At the Council of Nicaea in 325, when the heretic Arius denied Christ’s divinity, Nicholas reportedly struck him in the face. So the other bishops stripped Nicholas of his vestments for this breach of decorum. That night, Christ and Mary appeared to several bishops in dreams, commanding them to restore Nicholas. The vestments were returned.
This is the man we celebrate in December. Not a jolly gift-giver, but a defender of orthodoxy willing to use his fists when words failed. The legends that accumulated around him reflect this: he rescued sailors from storms, saved three girls from prostitution by throwing bags of gold through their window, and resurrected three murdered children from a barrel of brine where a butcher had hidden them.
His stories spread across Europe after his death. His relics were stolen from Myra by Italian merchants in 1087 and brought to Bari, where his cult exploded. Every sailor, every merchant, every person in danger invoked Nicholas. The Eastern Church venerates him as a wonder-worker. The Western Church made him patron of children, merchants, students, brewers, pawnbrokers, and the falsely accused.
By the medieval period, his feast day (6 December) was marked across Europe with processions, gift-giving, and inversions of social order. Children became bishops for a day. Servants were served by masters. The world turned upside down for one night, then righted itself.
The inversions varied by region. In the Netherlands, Nicholas rode a white horse. In parts of Germany and Austria, he travelled with Knecht Ruprecht or Krampus, demonic figures who punished wicked children while Nicholas rewarded the good. These were not uniform traditions. They were local, rooted in place, shaped by centuries of practice that blended Christian saint and pre-Christian winter spirits.
The saint remained recognisable even when accompanied by creatures from pagan origins.
The Black Pete Tradition
The blackening tradition is older than most people think. Long before Jan Schenkman published his 1850 picture book, Dutch folklore knew the black bogeyman. In 1792, De Joodsche Wandelaar described him: ‘I had blackened my face and rattled so terribly with the chain that the house shook. With a hollow voice I asked if there were any naughty children? That I was Sinter Klaas, who now rode to look for boys who would not learn, but who had apples, nuts, chestnuts and Sinterklaas goods for sweet children.’
This was Sinterklaas himself: blackened and terrifying. In Protestant regions where Catholic saint veneration was forbidden, the bishop figure was suppressed. What remained was chain-rattling black bogeyman that gave sweets to good children and threatened the wicked. Sometimes called him ‘Zwarte Klaas’, sometimes Piet met de Pooten, sometimes just the Devil.
The blackening meant disguise and otherness. The soot separated the masked figure from ordinary humanity. On the Wadden Islands, the Ouwe Sunderklazen wore blackened faces or masks well into the twentieth century. In North Germany, similar figures appeared: Sunnerklaus on Wangerooge, Bullerklas in Westphalen, and Aschenklas who carried a bag of ashes. All had darkened faces, and combined saint and demon.
An 1802 Amsterdam education book warned against the practice: ‘One had, in former times, and still has here and there, the bad custom that on the day dedicated to a Roman saint named St. Nikolaas, fellows were disguised and blackened, who then had to represent that saint, went around houses with rattling chains and frightened the children.’ The author described how his brother died of terror after such an encounter.
The Standardisation
Everything changed in 1850. Amsterdam schoolteacher Jan Schenkman published Sint Nikolaas en zijn knecht, codifying the modern Dutch Sinterklaas. In Schenkman’s version, Nicholas arrives by steamboat from Spain, rides a white horse over rooftops, and is helped by a helper who climbs down chimneys.
The book was illustrated. The knecht had dark skin, curly hair, red lips. Schenkman gave him no name. Whether he intended a Moorish servant (Spain had been under Islamic rule) or a soot-covered chimney sweep is debated. What matters is that, unlike leftist say, Schenkman did not invent the blackening. He only took the black boogeyman tradition and made it a less scary servant.
Within decades, Schenkman’s version became the version. Regional variations were dismissed. The threatening black boogeyman became cheerful Black Pete. The chains and terror slowly disappeared. By 1895, ‘Zwarte Piet’ was the standard name, though regional variants persisted: Assiepan, Sabbas, Hans Moef, Jacques Jour, Sjaak Sjoor.
On Ameland, the Sunneklaas tradition continued. It preserved elements that elsewhere had been sanitised. An actual continuation of older customs that the Church had absorbed but never quite suppressed.
The first death was the standardisation. What had been living traditions, adapted locally over centuries, became a national brand.
The Multiculturalist Kitsch
In 2011, a UN working group on people of African descent visited the Netherlands and declared Black Pete a racist caricature. Dutch activists, brainwashed by American racial obsessions agreed. They saw blackface, minstrelsy, and colonialism.
None of these things were ever relevant in the Netherlands. We did not have black face minstrels. These people see the world through American racial categories, and which permit only one interpretation of a dark-skinned figure in service to a white authority: racism.
But the actual history (pagan wild men, soot traditions, medieval inversions, Protestant suppression of Catholic saints leading to blackened boogeyman figures, syncretism between Christian and pre-Christian) was irrelevant. Intentions were irrelevant, regional variations were irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was how the tradition made foreigners feel when filtered through an ideology imported from a country that has no tradition, and no understanding of European folklore.
So they came with a compromise: Rainbow Pete, Soot Sweep Pete (Roetveegpiet). Dozen compromises, each more pathetic than the last. Petes with strategically placed soot smudges. Petes in various skin tones to represent ‘diversity’. Costumes changing based on whatever the municipality’s diversity committee approves.
But none of this satisfies anyone. The activists are not happy because Pete still exists. And the rest of the population is not happy because the tradition is gutted. It was already a commercial spectacle by the time the blackface debate began.
Which was its second death: the reduction of a complex folk tradition with pre-Christian roots into a simple question of representation. Is this racist? becomes the only question we’re allowed to ask. The answer, pre-determined by academic ideology, restructures the entire tradition.
What is lost is everything that made it worth defending. The wild men are gone. The inversion of order is gone. The hint of danger, the moment when children were not sure if they’d get gifts or beatings, the annual reminder that saints and demons occupy the same calendar: it is all gone.
We’re left with a celebration that offends foreigners, and is protected by kitsch nationalists, who do not know anything, except that Pete used to be black.
We now have a tradition maintained out of habit, defended without conviction, and reformed into meaninglessness.
The Christian Heritage
The medieval Church was smarter than contemporary diversity managers. When missionaries encountered pagan winter festivals, they did not ban them, but baptised them. The winter solstice became Christmas. The wild hunt became the retinue of saints. The gift-giving, the feasting, and the inversions were all redirected towards Christian ends without erasing their pagan origins.
This worked because tradition and religion is lived, and not theorised. People need their festivals. They need moments when the normal order breaks, with figures who are half-saint, half-monster. Figures that reward and punish, and come from outside the everyday world bearing gifts and threats.
Black Pete in his original form was one of these figures. He was never a caricature, since he did not represent an actual human being. He was otherness itself: the stranger, the wild, the dangerous.
The Protestant suppression pushed the tradition underground, and transformed the bishop into a boogeyman. The tradition survived because it served a function that people needed: An annual inversion, a moment of terror and gift-giving combined: a reminder that the world contains forces beyond human control.
The activists who destroyed this understood nothing. They thought they were fighting racism. But actually fought the last remnants of European pre-Christian traditions that the Church had wisely preserved within Christian celebration.
The result is a Sinterklaas celebration that has been sanitised into corporate hospitality. Whether Soot Sweep, or completely Black: the helpers are not wild men, they’re not dangerous or mysterious. Just men and women in costumes and a committee-approved number of helpers in whatever combination they fancy.
The conclusion
Standardisation weakens tradition. Multiculturalism, which is kitsch in itself, can only accept the superficial. The things that cannot insult others: foods, clothing etc.
The standardisers at least wanted the tradition to continue. They wanted it predictable, commercial, safe. It succeeded, and left the structure intact. Because their hollowed-out Saint Nicholas was still recognisable.
But each concession leads to another demand. Each reform requires another reform. The process ends only when nothing remains.
This is what happens when traditions are subjected to ideological scrutiny rather than organic evolution. Real traditions change slowly in response to genuine need and local adaptation. They are not reengineered by committees to satisfy foreigners who have no connection to our traditions.
The Dutch should have told the UN working group to shut up. They should have told that their objections do not apply to European folk customs. They should have defended Black Peter, not as a caricature, but as a survival of pre-Christian tradition that has nothing to do with race at all.
They did not because liberals do not believe in anything. And now Sinterklaas is dying. But not because of persecution (that might have strengthened it) but by a thousand reforms bringing the tradition closer to irrelevance.
The children nowadays never face the wild men anymore. Their parents barely dare to correct them. The next generation will remember that Sinterklaas as a corporate mascot, just like American Santa Claus.
The feast might survive. But the actual living practice, rooted in place and history, shaped by centuries of Christian and pre-Christian interaction is already dead.
And no amount of Black Petes will bring that back.
-Robbert
Further reading:
Een kleine overweging voor het feest van Sint Nicolaas, FSSPX (Dutch)
Black Pete & Sinterklaas: UN experts encourage respectful national debate on Dutch tradition (English)
The Origin of Krampus, Europe’s Evil Twist on Santa, Smithsonian Magazine (English)
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