In NL the tradition has it that Saint Nicholas hails from Spain (he didn&#x27;t he was originally from Turkey) and the &#x27;Black Pete&#x27;s&#x27; that you refer to are his helpers (can&#x27;t have a Saint that&#x27;s black now, can we...). There is a ton of hypocrisy at work there and there has recently been quite a bit of backlash. Predictably the anti-Europe sentimentalists seized on this to tell the rest of the world they shouldn&#x27;t mess with our perfectly racist traditions.<p>The Moors (which the Black Petes represent) are an interesting chapter in the history of mankind in their own right, and were <i>Muslims</i> rather than associated with the Christian faith, to see them as helpers of a Christian entity must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but in the present it is less so.<p>This is likely also the reason why &#x27;St Nicholas&#x27; hails from Spain for the Dutch because the Moors did in fact inhabit a chunk of Spain at some point rather than from Turkey where he actually was from, a country that the Dutch kids probably had trouble relating to before 1960, but Spain was a lot more visible.<p>The typical threat parents used to use to get their kids to behave was to threaten them with beatings by the Black Petes and if that didn&#x27;t work out to be stuffed in burlap bags and taken to Spain...