saint nicholas, sinterklaas and baby jesus

as our children get older, it seems more important to be intentional about how we celebrate holidays, and what traditions we make for our family. i love this time of year--the colder weather, the christmas trees and lights, the crafting, the baking, and even the gift-giving. i want noah and isla to love it too. but i want them also to understand the waiting--that right now is not yet the christmas season, but rather the season of advent. that we shouldn't really be singing christmas carols yet (though i have been listening to sufjan), but songs about waiting. (sunday we sang "come thou long expected jesus," one of my favorites.) and mostly i want them to know that what we're celebrating on christmas day is the birth of the little baby who changed the world.

many of my friends with small children are beginning traditions of celebrating saint nicholas on his saint's day, december 5, and making this their main christmas tradition. the real saint nicholas was a bishop of myra who secretly gave gifts to the needy, resurrected children, and calmed rough seas for sailors. saint nicholas day is celebrated differently around the world. we're most familiar with the dutch sinterklaas celebration, which is something aaron's pake and oma grew up with and passed on pieces of to their children. in this tradition dutch children put out their shoes filled with hay or carrots for sinterklaas's horse, and wake in the morning to find the hay replaced with a treat, and nearby a bag of presents delivered by sinterklaas in the night. (let's not even get into the topic of sinterklaas's helpers, zwarte pieten, or black peters!)

this year we spent saint nicholas day with some friends in lynden, a town nearby with a primarily dutch population. we processed with sinterklaas and zwarte piet from the lynden chamber of commerce to the community center, where we then watched some klompen dancing, heard some stories, sang some songs and could have pictures taken with sinterklaas. noah was mildly interested and a bit nervous. there's no way he would've sat on sinterklaas's lap, even if we had braved the very long line to do so.

(here's me and isla with our friends marissa and isadora, with sinterklaas and a few zwarte piets in the background.)

but we sort of dropped the ball this year on any attempt to celebrate the real saint nicholas. really i think noah is still a bit young to understand the relationship between the stories of our saints (and of our savior) and his little life. i don't want him to feel overwhelmed or stressed out by our attempts to indoctrinate him with our beliefs, or to make every holiday so full of meaning and significance that it becomes almost forced. rather, i want him to grow into a natural understanding of and interest in the reasons behind our family traditions and our faith.

we haven't talked too much about the reason for christmas, but he knows that it is the celebration of the birth of baby jesus. how do you explain incarnation and fulfillment of prophesy to a two-year-old? i think for now i'll let the story explain itself. he has a golden book version of the christmas story which he LOVES. he takes it to bed with him, and sometimes it counts as two of his three bedtime stories, and we read it twice. so maybe i'm taking my job too seriously. maybe he will teach himself what christmas is all about.

next year i think we'll celebrate a more traditional saint nicholas day. i love the idea of teaching my children the importance of giving to the poor, and of doing things with no thought to self (like helping at a soup kitchen, spending time with older folks, buying something for a needy family, etc.). but i feel okay about also celebrating christmas on the 25th, since this honors something altogether different--the birth of the christ-child. it is a little strange to exchange gifts with one another in celebration of someone else's birthday... but maybe as time goes on we'll figure out just the right way for our family to be able to honor jesus and also give to one another. i know some families don't do gifts on christmas day, in order to keep that day sacred. we'll see.

i'd love to hear ideas from any of you on how you integrate your beliefs with family traditions!