Now that's the kind of Christmas story you can be proud of - the Americans won't be making any silly feel-good films about that one. To be fair, you lads did have a rather messy argument with the Dutch once upon a time, and apparently they really took it to heart. Curiously, in the usual self-deprecating manner of the Irish, there are some who think that the modern exporting of Irish to live and work in England is itself a worthy curse upon the English themselves (as part of our revenge). Apparently the Dutch do not share a similar sentiment about such things, and prefer to bear a grudge instead, on into legend and lore. It is, in the long view, utterly astonishing what effects the extremely prolonged fall of the Roman Empire had on Europe so many centuries after the fact itself.Wikipedia wrote:In the Netherlands and Flanders, Zwarte Piet (Dutch for "Black Pete") is a servant of Sinterklaas, who delivers bags of presents on December 5 and takes naughty kids back to Spain in the now empty bags.
And the moral of the story seems to be: Do not to mess with the Habsburgs. That's one seriously unhappy family.
