Today marks the yearly departure of Sinterklaas who, together with his faithful friend Zwarte Piet, makes his way back to sunny Spain—by horse and steamboat, of course. The festivities on the sixth of December are not to celebrate his departure but to celebrate the name day of Saint Nicholas, patron saint of the children, on which Sinterklaas is based.
For those of you outside of Europe thinking “Hey, Sinterklaas sounds a lot like our Santa Claus”, well guess what: Sinterklaas was here first and your Santa is just a poor imitation.
In The Netherlands and Belgium, Sinterklaas is a very popular tradition, where during the run up to today, even from half of November, children can put an empty shoe somewhere near the mantelpiece in the hope of the Sint (“the saint”) and Piet visiting the house (via the roof and said mantelpiece) to drop some candy in the children’s shoes. This is usually a combination of marzipan, onze-lieve-vrouw guimauves (harder marshmellows shaped like Mary), nic-nac letterkoekjes, speculaas (spiced cookies), and of course various chocolate figures.
The popularity of Sinterklaas inevitably also means TV shows, live shows, specialized pop-up shops, school parties, and more. In the early nineties, the then Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep (BRT) broadcaster hosted two seasons of the Dag Sinterklaas show featuring Jan Decleir as the Sint, Frans Van der Aa as Zwarte Piet, and Bart Peeters as the innocent visitor asking nosy questions on how the duo operates.
Like many Flemish eighties/nineties kids, Dag Sinterklaas is permanently burned into my brain as part of my youth. The episode called Speelgoed (toys) from the second season is especially memorable for me, as we catch the Goedheiligen Man (The Good Saint) playing… on a Game Boy!
In the episode, Sinterklaas is annoyed by the beeps and boops coming from Zwarte Piet’s Game Boy. Piet is usually portrayed as a (too) playful character that likes to fool around instead of doing the serious stuff such as reading the Spanish newspapers and updating the Dakenkaart (rooftop chart) needed to navigate the rooftops when dropping off presents. While Bart visits, Sinterklaas showcases that “simple toys” are much more enjoyable. He encourages them to play with dusty old dolls and a toll. Eventually, Piet and Bart make it outside whilst playing horse, only to catch the Sint grabbing Piet’s Game Boy to figure out for himself what these so-called compinuter spelletjes (computer games) are about. Hilarious.
Of course, that was the perfect advert for Nintendo’s handheld, especially considering the upcoming Christmas holiday period. In 1993, lots of amazing Game Boy games were released, including Link’s Awakening, Kirby’s Pinball Land, Duck Tales 2, Turtles III: Radical Rescue, and Tetris 2. It would be next to impossible to go after the Flemish sales data of the machine to try and prove a correlation, but if the Sint likes playing on the Game Boy, and the Sint is thé person that gets to decide what kids can play with, then why bother getting your kid a Game Gear, right? Sorry, Sega.
Perhaps I even got a Game Boy game thrown down the chimney, I can’t remember. All I can remember is the chocolate, marzipan, and VHS tapes of Disney movies.
I have searched high and low for a Dutch Club Nintendo Magazine that contains a message from the Sint and came up empty, but Volume 2 Issue 6 in 1990 contained a lovely letter from Santa Mario:
Replace the goofy Christmas hat with the mijter (mitra) of Sinterklaas, add a staff, and we’re there.
Dag Sinterklaas is undeniably a local cult hit. The DVDs are nowhere to be found, and the few copies surfacing the local second hand )e)markets go for outrageous prices. Cherishing our copy, this year is the first year we watched the episodes together with our daughter. She doesn’t have the patience to sit through some of the longer ones but it’s a giant nostalgic injection seeing Jan and Frans back in action.
BRT—now VRT; Flemish instead of Belgian—aired the series every single year until 2018. In 2019, because of the ageing image quality (and probably the emerging woke culture), twenty new episodes were produced. However, in my view, Wim Opbrouck never managed to truly capture the Sint’s spirit like Jan did, and Jonas Van Thielen as Zwarte Piet is just not as funny as Frans.
So we’ll be stuck in Dag Sinterklaas 1992-1993 mode for the next eight or so year, until our kids realize the big ruse. And even then. I will be keeping up the tradition.
Did you know there’s a Sinterklaas DOS game (1998) that’s been rewritten as a Flash game (2006) using the functional programming language Clean? The popular retro YouTuber LGR even covered the DOS version! The original author, Mike Wiering, is of course a Dutch fellow that dutifully carries the Sinterklaas tradition forward.
The premise of the 2D platformer is simple: Sinterklaas has been robbed of all the presents, so he needs to get them back and shove them down the right chimney to make the children happy. Don’t forget to collect speculaas/pepernoten on the way as a bonus.
Now who’s willing to port this to the Game Boy so Sinterklaas can play as himself?