The Sinterklaas season is the most important confectionery season in the Dutch calendar. It runs from the saint's official arrival — by steamboat from Spain, in the children's narrative — in mid-November, to the evening of the fifth of December, known as pakjesavond, when gifts and sweets are exchanged and the season closes. In Belgium the feast is kept on the morning of 6 December rather than the previous evening, and the candy mix has its own local accents.
What distinguishes the Sinterklaas tradition from other European saint's-day customs is the density of its associated confectionery. A handful of sweets belong unambiguously to the season — spiced pepernoten and kruidnoten, chocolate letters, marzipan figures, borstplaat and taai-taai — and most Dutch households work through some version of the sequence every year. Shops stock the first of them weeks before the saint arrives; the annual complaint that the kruidnoten are on the shelves "earlier than ever" is a fixture of the Dutch press. This entry maps the calendar; each sweet has its own entry, linked below.
What do the Dutch eat for Sinterklaas?
In short: kruidnoten and pepernoten (small spiced biscuits, scattered by the handful), a chocoladeletter (a chocolate initial for each family member), marsepein (marzipan figures, often a pink pig or fruit), borstplaat (a fondant-like sugar candy, often home-made), taai-taai (a chewy honey-rye-anise figure biscuit), and speculaas, the spiced biscuit whose spice mix runs through much of the season. Chocolate figures of the saint and his helpers fill out the shelves.
Origins of the feast
The cult of Saint Nicholas of Myra reached the Low Countries in the Middle Ages, and by the late medieval period his feast was already associated with gifts for children. Edible gifts — spiced cakes, biscuits, sugar figures — appear in Dutch sources and paintings from the seventeenth century onward. After the Reformation the Dutch authorities made periodic attempts to curb the Catholic feast and its markets, but the domestic custom survived. The modern form of the celebration, with the steamboat, the horse and the large family evening, took shape in the nineteenth century, and the bakers and confectioners who supplied it grew with it.
The figure of Zwarte Piet, the saint's helper, has since the 2010s been the subject of intense debate in the Netherlands, and many retailers and manufacturers have moved away from blackface imagery on packaging in favour of "soot-smudged" Pieten or neutral designs. The sweets themselves are unchanged; the iconography on their wrappers is what has shifted.
The sequence
The candy calendar runs in roughly three phases. The first, from mid-November, is dominated by kruidnoten and pepernoten — bought by the bag and scattered by adults playing Piet, then gathered up by children. The second, in the run-up to the fifth, brings the chocolate letters, handed out within families, at school and at work; the convention is that everyone receives the initial of their first name. The third, the days immediately around the feast, brings marsepein in moulded figures, borstplaat and taai-taai figures of the saint and his helpers.
| Phase | Period | Principal sweets |
|---|---|---|
| I — Arrival | Mid-Nov onward | Kruidnoten, pepernoten, speculaas, taai-taai on the shelves |
| II — Run-up | Late Nov | Chocoladeletters at home, school and work |
| III — Eve and day | 5–6 Dec | Marsepein, borstplaat, chocolate figures, the gift-bag mix |
Kruidnoten and pepernoten
Most of the small round biscuits sold as "pepernoten" today are, strictly speaking, kruidnoten: crisp, round, wheat-based and flavoured with speculaaskruiden (cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, ginger, white pepper and related spices). The older pepernoot is a chewier, irregular piece made with rye flour, honey and anise — close to taai-taai dough. In everyday Dutch the two names have long been used interchangeably, and bakers and food writers have tried to restore the distinction since the late twentieth century. The details are in the dedicated entry.
Chocoladeletters
The chocolate letter descends from letters made of bread dough and pastry, which were given at Sinterklaas long before chocolate was affordable. Factory-made chocolate letters appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and are now one of the most recognisable symbols of the feast. The letters are usually set in a heavy slab-serif style, and manufacturers adjust thickness so that a slim "I" weighs the same as a wide "M".
The figural sweets
Taai-taai — "tough-tough" — is a chewy biscuit of rye flour, honey and anise, pressed into figures of the saint, a Piet or other folk shapes. Marsepein is marzipan, given at Sinterklaas in moulded and painted figures: fruit, animals and, most famously, the little pink marzipan pig. Borstplaat is a crumbly, fondant-like sugar candy made from sugar with water, milk or cream, flavoured with vanilla, cocoa, coffee or fruit and set in hearts, rounds or other small shapes; it is the Sinterklaas sweet most often made at home.
In the household
Within the household the sweets are rarely eaten in isolation. A knock on the door, a handful of kruidnoten thrown into the room, a shoe set out by the fireplace or door in the evenings before the feast and found with a small gift or sweet in the morning: these are the familiar gestures. The fifth itself centres on pakjesavond, the opening of presents and the reading of Sinterklaasgedichten, teasing verses written by family members for one another, and the chocolate letter and a marzipan figure are among the most common small gifts on the table.
Belgium and Christmas
In Flanders, Sint-Niklaas visits on the night of 5 to 6 December and children find their presents in the morning. Speculoos and moulded chocolate figures of the saint are especially prominent there, and Belgian chocolatiers produce seasonal Sint-Niklaas ranges alongside their pralines. In both countries Christmas gift-giving has grown since the late twentieth century, but in many families with young children Sinterklaas remains the main occasion for presents and seasonal sweets.