It
shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about names to learn that I’m
Dutch. My parents took advantage in 1961 of the assisted passage scheme that
brought 10,000 of us to NZ between the years 1947-62.
One thing I
had to get my little head around was that Saint Nicholas didn’t do his annual
stuff in the Antipodes on the 5th of December as he did back at
home, but almost three weeks later.
Well, he’s a busy guy, I surmised, so I
guess he starts in Europe and works his way down, and that takes time. But he didn’t
quite look the same in NZ either – perhaps his wife was washing his Northern
Hemisphere clothes when he went south.
