Aka “La Saint-Nicolas”. Celebrated on Dec. 6 every year.
I got into this celebration when I lived in Northern France and very close to Belgium, so I had friends both French and Belgian, and Belgian-French. Celebrating saint feast days was also something I had never heard about before becoming Catholic, so I never celebrated this day before getting married and having children of my own. So in the interest of living liturgically and à la française, I present to you La Saint-Nicolas:
Unfortunately, in Anglo Canada, there are basically no bakeries or stores that sell actual Saint Nicholas treats. Sure, there is Santa Clause galore, but not the SAINT Nicholas:
So I have to make my own Saint Nicholas treats. The first books we ever had about the legend of Saint Nicholas were in English:
The Baker’s Dozen is the one we got the cookie tradition from:
Two different recipes can be found here and here. You can find the cookie pattern here and print it out and trace it onto your cookie dough. My husband actually made me a cookie cutter with his 3D printer. It is very useful. I buy red cookie icing from the store, because frankly it is nearly impossible to make such a dark shade of red at home.
But then what do you do with the cookies? The Saint Nicholas tradition we follow is that the children leave their shoes out on the evening of Dec. 5, and I fill them with cookies and treats for them to find the next morning. In France and Belgium there were so many Saint-Nicolas cookies and chocolates you could buy….alas, not so in Canada. I even resorted to making my own St. Nicolas chocolates with an expensive mold that I had shipped from Europe:
It is also traditional to leave chocolate coins in the shoes, because one of the legends is that Saint Nicolas left golden coins for some sisters in poverty. Oranges too (or whatever small orange fruit is around: mandarins, clementines, tangerines, cuties (?))
But I realized we needed some French books. The only one I have so far in French is this:
Sadly it is now out of print! Why does everything I love go out of print? 😭
I saw that Quelle Histoire has a book about Saint Nicolas, and it is kind of sort of available in Canada (ordered upon request by Les Libraires):
We own a few Quelle Histoire books and I have liked them. They are small in size and usually you can listen to the audio version on the app.
If you search “Saint Nicolas” in Les Libraires.ca, there are some options that come up. Some of them look not too bad. Like this one:
There is a creepy (and probably not true) legend of Saint Nicholas that an evil butcher agreed to lodge three children in his home for the night, but he killed them and stored them in a pickling barrel. Then along came Saint Nicholas, who miraculously restored the children to life:
Every French child knows this legend because there is a famous song called La légende de Saint Nicolas. We learned it from this wonderful book by Henriette Major (who makes great French song books that come with a CD):
We are lucky that our library has a copy of this book. Anyways, don’t worry too much about the gory legend, kids love to be spooked. And what could be spookier than an evil guy that tries to pickle three innocent children?!?!
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