Day 152: St. Nicholas and Black Pete Battle For the Holidays!

Every year on December 6th I wake up to find candy and small gifts in my shoes. I forget about it every year, but it still happens. Supposedly St. Nicholas leaves the gifts on St. Nicholas Day (December 5th or 6th depending on your cultural background), but I think that's a lie. I believe that my wife actually does it, because the real St. Nicholas only leaves candy if you're good and I know I'm never good enough to get two Toblerone bars and about $3.50 in chocolate coins. This year I got a little extra surprise when I woke up early to go to work, went to empty the candy out of my shoes and I found our entryway, and my shoes, swarming with ants.

Every year when it starts to get cold we start having ant problems in our apartments. It doesn't seem to follow any rhyme or reason because they just pop up randomly and not always around food products. In this case I thought it was the candy, but as I pulled each piece out and inspected it before putting it in a plastic bag I only found a few ants on the chocolate. Most of the ants seemed content to run around like crazy on the cold tile or hide in my shoes. Anyway, I sprayed ant killer in the entryway, threw my shoes out and called the apartment office to get the pest guys to come spray for us. I hate ants.

So, anyway, about this picture. It's St. Nicholas being a total dick to Donatello and throwing candy at him real sarcastically like, "Yeah, you were real good this year. Here's your candy." Meanwhile Black Pete (Skeeter from Doug according to Shaun) is sneaking up behind Donatello to throw him in a sack so they can take him back to Spain and torture him.

What? You don't know Black Pete? He's St. Nicholas' helper. Look it up. He's a favorite (and pretty goddamned racist) character from the St. Nicholas legend, most popular in the Netherlands. Do a Google search for him. The only pictures you'll find are a bunch of white Europeans in black face. Some stories say he's black because of the soot from the chimneys, but that's a damn lie. His clothes don't seem to be affected and I know those dirty chimneys didn't put that red lipstick on him.

Really I guess it's a well-meaning character that was a product of it's time, but still, Black Pete is like the Christmas version of those crows from Dumbo. Anyway, he steals kids who are bad so I guess that makes him like a border-line pedophile too, probably.