Alle Jahre wieder

Apparently I've been a much better boy than I would've believed: Today's St Nick's day haul was a little crazy. When I came to my desk, there was already chocolate on it. My stocking at home had a pound of pralined almonds as well as more than half a pound of marzipan in various forms. And this is in addition to the bag of Godiva truffles the Old Man brought home yesterday not even remembering what day it was! Recalling last year's Spekulatius surfeit (we ended up with a kilo of them), I strictly forbade him to buy any, so it looks like he compensated in other areas.

OGI has just begun learning who the Good Bishop is. Last night he called him "Peter Pan". Today he asked, "Who is that man again?" It gave me the idea of looking for a storybook for him, but pickings were slim on Amazon, at least for what I had in mind. The classics of Low Country child literature don't seem to have been translated so it's a choice between (a) smarmy recent American morality tales and (b) lots of accounts of "the real St Nicholas", including everything from semi-scholarly works to picture books featuring Nicholas of Bursa. I even had a look at some Dutch-language editions (I've already bought them foreign-language books before and read them aloud, translating on the fly) but they all seem to prominently feature Zwarte Piet in all his racist glory.