Celebration: Saint Nicholas.

 Saint Nicholas.

In Belgium, there are different regions and in each of them a different language is spoken, for example, in the Wallonia region French is spoken and on the other hand the Germanophobe community speaks German. Due to this event, there are two figures that represent Santa Claus: the first one is Saint Nicholas, Saint Nicholas visits the parts where French is usually spoken, the other figure is Santa Claus who visits the part where German is spoken. In this part of the blog we will talk about San Nicolas.

San Nicolas usually visits the children twice a year. The first visit that San Nicolas makes is every December 4th and he does it in order to investigate which children have behaved well and which children have behaved badly throughout the year. If a child has been very good, Saint Nicholas will return on December 6 to leave gifts under their Christmas tree (usually the gifts that Saint Nicholas leaves for children who have been good are some toys and delicious candies), but if a child has misbehaved, then Saint Nicholas will only leave a few branches under the Christmas tree.

The children know that Saint Nicholas often travels on his beautiful white horse, so they put a carrot or a turnip inside  their shoe to give the horse a gift, likewise, Saint Nicholas has a companion, people paint him black (although currently that is very racist, but that is the tradition). His name is Pedro de black; Pedro usually accompanies Saint Nicholas to deliver gifts so that there aren´t mistakes in the gifts. Children always look foward to the arrival of Saint Nicholas, so they tend to behave well throughout the year, in order to receive gifts from Saint Nicholas.