St. Nicolas Day and Family Traditions

Tomorrow is St. Nicolas Day. Being that my husband, and therefore my children are of Dutch heritage, we have often talked about how to incorporate Dutch traditions into our Christmas celebrations. With Tee being three and a half, this seemed like a good year to start.

Although my father-in-law was actually born in Holland, most of the information we have about this holiday comes from either my non-Dutch upbringing or a David Sedaris essay. So it is with these sources that we started to put together what will hopefully become cherished traditions our children will want to share with their children as well. Except...

Tee's best friend is named Nicolette. So she was having a hard time trying to figure out why she couldn't stay up if Nicolette was coming over to our house tonight. So for this year, we had to give up on St. Nicolas coming to our house, and went back to Santa Claus (I know, I know he's based on the real St. Nick.) He's just coming for a preview tonight. And since Santa Claus is coming later in the month, we had already planned to keep St. Nicolas day true to traditional Dutch custom, and have the girls leave their shoes out to be filled with candy. Tee really liked this idea, and chose to set her new party shoes, black patent leather mary jane's outside her door. Even Sweet Potato got excited about the idea, and went and grabbed one pink mary jane from her own closet to add to the collection. Seemed like we were ready to make some memories, except...

Tee remembered that candy makes things sticky, and started to freak out a little about her new black party shoes getting sticky when she hadn't even worn them and there are so many parties this month. So we compramised that Santa Claus would as part of his preview visit leave candy next to the shoes.

So while things didn't go off as perfectly as imagined, I now have cute stories to repeat to the girls about when they were little, and that is the beginning of a beautiful family tradition.