[jacquesm]

In NL the tradition has it that Saint Nicholas hails from Spain (he didn't he was originally from Turkey) and the 'Black Pete's' that you refer to are his helpers (can't have a Saint that'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't mess with our perfectly racist traditions.

The Moors (which the Black Petes represent) are an interesting chapter in the history of mankind in their own right, and were Muslims 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.

This is likely also the reason why 'St Nicholas' 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.

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't work out to be stuffed in burlap bags and taken to Spain...