Christmas in Belgium

St. Nicholas' Day

Special note: St. Nicholas is not Santa Claus!

December 6th is a very important holiday for children in Belgium. On this day, there will be adults dressed as Grandpa St. Nicholas, wearing high red hats, white beards on their faces, and holding bags of chocolates and biscuits to send to the lovely children. The chocolate and biscuits are also shaped like the cartoons of St. Nicholas.

In the student dormitory where I live, one night in December, the dormitory administrator also disguised as Grandpa St. Nicholas and came to distribute chocolates and cookies one by one, especially to the children. Just as they passed by our door that night, as soon as I heard the music, I rushed out and waited at the door. Although I was already past the age of a child, they kindly sympathized with me for some food> The feeling of begging 🍬 candy for the festival. I got a white chocolate, a dark chocolate and some cookies. It's really delicious, no wonder children like this festival~

A scary Christmas Eve

At 9:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve, I still need to go to class, because there are too many people to report for the class I take, and I can't report all of them at the same time the previous week. The professor put the group of us who did not need to go home early to reunite in this week to report. Although it was affected by the epidemic, the reporting format was changed to online. Early in the morning (the lights only start to light up around 9 o'clock in Belgium at present), I still rode my bicycle to the school to meet with my classmates to prepare the report. Just in case the computer suddenly fails, it can be switched immediately. After the class ended at about 11:30, I would like to say that I can go home for the holiday after checking the condition of my precious equipment before the Christmas holiday. As soon as I arrived at the scene, I found: System Error! This is a problem that has never occurred in normal times, but I encountered it at this juncture.＠＠ I quickly contacted a reliable engineer in the Netherlands and asked him for help. While contacting, my hands were still sweating, and my body was trembling to check what went wrong. Fortunately, the uncle of the engineer is very powerful. After I sent him a picture of the scene through What'sapp for evaluation, I followed the steps he said, and finally the instrument obediently returned to the normal light. After confirming again in the afternoon that there was no problem, he breathed a sigh of relief. After expressing gratitude to the engineer and saying: Happy Holidays!, we finally started the Christmas holiday at the end of the year without any risk.

Reunion night style is different

In the evening of Christmas Eve, my wife and I went for a walk on the Grand Place in Leuven to get a sense of Christmas. On the way, I found that there were two rows of exquisite restaurants in the entire street. Except for one restaurant that felt very short of money and was still open, the doors of the others were locked and they went home early. On the contrary, in Taiwan, during the New Year's Eve, restaurants are usually the busiest and possibly one of the most lucrative days of the year. Maybe it's also because many Taiwanese don't like to cook it by themselves, so it seems to have a Chinese New Year atmosphere when they go to a restaurant to eat. After chatting with a Spanish senior, I learned that their Christmas will not be like our New Year's Eve dinner, which is full of meat and fish. Sometimes there are too many preparations, and they will continue to eat for a few days. They will have regular special dishes on Christmas Eve, Christmas and Boxing day the next day, such as Pasta beef ball soup, roast leg of lamb, beef cheese burritos, etc. Although the portion is small, it is very exciting. , of course, accompanied by a lot of good beer and wine. It was the same reunion night, but there was still a difference in feeling.

(Off-topic: I thought Boxing day was boxing day at first, but I learned from the Brussels Times column that it was the day when the master gave gifts to servants or the poor in the past, so it is called Boxing day. It has become a day for potluck, shopping or bingeing.)