The Sinterklaas season is the longest and most commercially significant confectionery event in the Dutch calendar. It runs from the saint's official arrival — by steamboat from Spain, in the prevailing children's narrative — in the second or third week of November, to the evening of the fifth of December, known as pakjesavond, when gifts and candy are distributed and the season formally closes. In the Belgian observance the dates are similar, though Flemish families traditionally exchange gifts on the morning of 6 December rather than the previous evening, and the candy mix shows local accents that diverge from the Dutch.
What distinguishes the Sinterklaas tradition from other European saint's-day customs is the density and specificity of its associated confectionery. There are perhaps eight or nine principal sweets that belong unambiguously to the season, each with its own production calendar, regional variants, and rules of distribution. Together they form a sequence that any Dutch household will execute, in some abbreviated form, every December — and that the Dutch supermarket trade prepares for in August, with shelf-clearing for kruidnoten beginning by the second week of September. This entry maps the calendar; individual sweets receive separate treatment, linked below.
Origins of the feast
The cult of Saint Nicholas of Myra reached the Low Countries in the early medieval period and had become firmly established as a children's feast by the late Middle Ages. The custom of gifting confectionery on the saint's eve is documented in Amsterdam from at least the seventeenth century — the Dutch Reformation made some attempts to suppress the figure as too Catholic, but the candy traditions proved stubborn enough to outlive the iconographic disputes. By the early nineteenth century the Sinterklaas figure as it is now recognised had stabilised, and the surrounding economy of bakers and confectioners had shifted on a permanent commercial basis to produce its distinctive sweets in volume.
The figure of Zwarte Piet, the saint's helper, has since the 2010s been the subject of intense and continuing debate within the Netherlands. The candy itself has been less affected than the visual iconography, but several manufacturers have quietly retired Piet imagery from their packaging since 2017, and the chocolate "Piet" figures that were once standard in supermarkets are now almost universally redrawn as soot-marked, plain, or relabelled simply as Pieten without the colour adjective. The change is recent enough to be visible in any photograph of a December candy aisle taken before and after about 2018.
The sequence
The candy calendar runs in roughly three phases. The first, from mid-November to about the last week of November, is dominated by kruidnoten and pepernoten — the small spiced cookies that are bought in 500g and 1kg bags, scattered by adults playing the role of Piet, and consumed at a steady rate throughout the season. Supermarket shelves load with these almost as soon as the autumn produce is cleared, and a contested annual custom is for one or another newspaper to publish a story about the kruidnoten arriving "earlier than ever this year."
The second phase, from late November through the first days of December, brings chocoladeletters — large solid-chocolate initials, one per family member. These are typically distributed at school, at workplaces, and within families in the days before the fifth, and the convention is that everyone receives the initial of their first name. The third and most concentrated phase, the days immediately around the feast, brings marsepein in moulded figural shapes, borstplaat fondant discs, and taai-taai, a chewy honey-rye cake-candy made into figures of the saint, his horse, and the various Pieten.
| Phase | Period | Principal sweets |
|---|---|---|
| I — Arrival | Mid-Nov to late Nov | Kruidnoten, pepernoten, taaitaaipoppen on retail shelves |
| II — Run-up | Last week of Nov | Chocoladeletters delivered through schools and workplaces |
| III — Eve and day | 4–6 Dec | Marsepein, borstplaat, suikergoed, gift-bag mix |
Kruidnoten and pepernoten
The two are not the same. The conflation between them is so pervasive in modern Dutch supermarket marketing that the broedernotenfederatie — half-jokingly the "kruidnoten dispute" — has been a recurring fixture in the Dutch food press for two decades. The short version, treated at length in the dedicated entry, is that pepernoten are the older form: small, irregular, chewy, built on a rye-and-anise dough that goes back to at least the seventeenth century. Kruidnoten are the modern form: small, round, crisp, built on a speculaaskoek dough and industrialised in the early twentieth century. Both are spiced with the speculaaskruiden mix — cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, white pepper, ginger, mace, and cardamom — and both are eaten by the handful, but their textures and provenance are quite different.
By volume, kruidnoten dominate the modern Dutch market: roughly 50 million kilograms are produced and consumed each Sinterklaas season, the bulk of it by the major industrial bakeries (Van Delft, Bolletje, and the supermarket house brands). Pepernoten survive in the artisan trade and in some regional bakeries; the major brands that still produce them under the older recipe market them as such on the packaging. Many cheaper supermarket products labelled "pepernoten" are, in fact, kruidnoten by recipe, which is the source of the conflation.
Chocoladeletters
The chocolate letter tradition is one of the older specifically Dutch elements of the feast. The custom is documented from at least the early nineteenth century and may have origins in a still-older medieval pedagogical practice in which letters made of bread were used to teach children the alphabet. The standard size is now industrial: 135g for school distribution, 200g for general retail, and 250g for premium variants. Most are produced by Droste, Van Houten, and a small set of supermarket house brands; Tony's Chocolonely entered the segment in the 2010s with single-origin variants. The convention that everyone receives the initial of their first name is observed almost without exception, and a noticeable retail effect is that the supermarket bin of "M" and "J" letters empties first in any given year.
The figural sweets
Three of the principal Sinterklaas sweets exist principally as figures rather than as standard shapes. Taai-taai is a soft, chewy, honey- and anise-flavoured cake-candy that is moulded into recognisable figures — most often the saint himself, sometimes a Piet, sometimes a horse or a windmill. It is sold by weight from baker's trays as well as in pre-packaged form, and is a particular fixture of regional bakeries.
Marsepein — the Dutch marzipan tradition, characterised by a higher almond content than its German equivalent and by a strong figural moulding tradition (pigs, vegetables, fruit, and most famously the marsepein varkentjes, little marzipan pigs) — is consumed in volume in the days immediately around the feast. The forms are partly didactic and partly comic; a particular Dutch convention is that the figures depict realistic animals and produce rather than mythological figures, in contrast to German marzipan, which leans more heavily on Christmas iconography.
Borstplaat — literally "chest plate," a name often supposed to refer to the medallion-like discs the candy is poured into — is a fondant of almost pure sugar, milk, and butter, set hard, and traditionally flavoured with vanilla, coffee, chocolate, or lemon. It is the most domestic of the Sinterklaas sweets and the one most commonly made at home, in part because the recipe is simple and in part because borstplaat does not store well and is best made fresh.
The cultural meaning
The Sinterklaas confectionery calendar is, more than any other Dutch food tradition, the one through which the food industry explicitly markets nostalgia. Annual surveys by Dutch market research firms place the per-household spend on Sinterklaas confectionery between €40 and €80, depending on the year and the survey methodology, with the figure rising sharply in households with children. The total commercial value of the season is on the order of €350 million in retail sales, of which kruidnoten alone account for roughly half.
Within the household, the candy is rarely eaten in isolation. The classical pattern is that an adult plays the role of Piet, scatters kruidnoten through the rooms in which children are present, and the children gather them — a domestic enactment of the older outdoor practice. The chocolate letters arrive in a shoe placed by the chimney or, in modern apartments, by the door, in the days leading up to the feast. The fifth itself is a quieter affair built around pakjesavond, gift-giving and the reading of Sinterklaasgedichten, doggerel verses composed by family members for one another.
Belgium and the dating divergence
Belgian observance differs in three particulars. First, gifts and candy are exchanged on the morning of 6 December rather than on the eve. Second, kruidnoten are less culturally central; the parallel Belgian sweet is the speculaas biscuit in larger forms, and the spiced cookies analogous to kruidnoten are a smaller part of the market. Third, the Belgian Sinterklaas is associated less with marzipan than with chocolate of the moulded-figure type — Saint Nicholas figures of solid chocolate, often hollow, are widely produced by Belgian chocolatiers in November and December and form a substantial seasonal share of the praline industry's revenue. The connection to the broader Belgian praline tradition is not incidental; many of the major chocolatiers produce a Sinterklaas range as a regular line item.
The Sinterklaas-Christmas relationship in the Low Countries deserves a note. Until the late twentieth century, Sinterklaas was overwhelmingly the principal gift-giving feast, and 25 December was a religious observance with little gift-exchange. The encroachment of Anglo-American Christmas customs has changed this somewhat, but in surveys conducted in the 2020s the majority of Dutch households continue to treat Sinterklaas as the larger of the two events, particularly where children are involved. The candy industry's seasonal calendar reflects this: the December chocolate range is built around Sinterklaas figures rather than around the Christmas iconography familiar elsewhere.