Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic How do you celebrate Christmas?

Our Christmas is quite different from other countries since we celebrate Christmas over two days. The 25th is the first day of Christmas, celebrated like all over the world. The 26th is the second day for us, what in English is like Boxing Day. Only we celebrate it rather like the first day.

For the rest, it's like most of the Western world. Advent calenders for kids, church for the religious people on Christmas Eve and presents on Christmas Day (traditionally, we only open them during the evening, as it feels more 'special' - called 'gezellig' in Dutch).

Dinner used to be a fancy business. A big home cooked meal with turkey or chicken and everything else you'd traditionally cook for Christmas. But these days, people see it as a day off, and so they don't like to spend it all day in the kitchen. Gourmets are very popular for Christmas, as are dinners in restaurants.

We actually have another 'holiday' in December: Saint Nikolas (or Sinterklaas, as we call him). To us, he's our equivalent of Santa Clause. So kids are lucky, two days with presents in one month!



That's our saint, with his helpers, 'zwarte pieten' (black petes ) His day is on December 5th, but he arrives in our country three weeks earlier by boat. All the way from Spain! Tradition has it that children who behaved badly, will be taken back to spain in the bags of the black petes. Children also get to set their shoes by the chimney at night, since the saint and his helpers put candy in it at night if they sing a song for him. If you leave him something nice like a picture or some carrots for his horse, you may get extra nice gifts.

Traditional candy looks like this:



Other specialties from him are chocolate letters and speculaas.

Adults also celebrate this day with gifts, but then wrapped up as surprises. So that takes a kind of creativity to make, but it makes for a very fun evening!

I no longer celebrate Sinterklaas, but I do celebrate Christmas. It just has something extra, more special to me. It's probably just the nice looks of all the lights and the tree.

Saskia