Black Pete: Christmas Culture Clash

Apologies Accepted

It's our Christmas episode. Christmaschristmaschristmaschristmaschristmaschristmaschristmas. We love it - the lights, the music, the cookies, the racist caricatures! Ah, Christmas - the yuletide celebration that brings the world closer together. A lovely time of year when we ask ourselves the eternal questions like: what is the meaning behind a black man dressed for a renaissance fair who has curly black hair and red red lips and puts children in a sack and beats them with a stick while taking them away to work in Spain. The meaning, in the Netherlands, is Christmas. What a fun jolly time of year, and what a fun jolly sidekick-servant-slave-companion for St. Nicholas to have, a colorfully dressed black man who punishes naughty children by forcing them to work (for free) in Santa's toy shop in Spain.

Listen, we get it. Black Pete is racist. But some Dutch people don't think so, they will argue with you, they will scream at you from their windmill houses, shaking their fists while throwing tulips and wooden shoes at you...be warned, the dutch are tolerant but that doesn't mean they will tolerate you talking smack about their beloved Zwarte Piet. He's been around for 150 years and comes from a children's story book and you Americans have Rudolph and Frosty and your Santa is fat like all Americans and shame on you for your history! Go drink some coca-cola and celebrate capitalism, you Americans!

Christmas gets ugly this year as we turn our attention to Dutch Delicious, a bakery in Edmonton (hello, Canada!) that thought it would be fun to share their Dutch cultural Christmas tradition of Black Pete with Canadians. They weren't prepared for the backlash and quickly offered an apology and a new version of Black Pete, Chimney Pete - which leads us to ask another eternal question: will our listeners in the Netherlands ever forgive us for the windmill houses and throwing tulip jokes?