Amsterdam at Christmas, and the saint who came first

A British visitor arriving in Amsterdam in early December, expecting the run-up to Christmas, generally finds the city's own big December festival has already happened. Sinterklaas, the Dutch celebration of Saint Nicholas, is marked on the 5th of December, or sometimes the evening before, with an entirely separate set of traditions from the ones a British Christmas market visitor is used to, and the character himself makes his official annual arrival even earlier, sailing into a Dutch harbour by boat from Spain, according to the story, in mid-November, to a welcome broadcast on national television and re-enacted in ports and town squares across the country.

Two festivals, not one stretched out

Sinterklaas and Christmas exist in the Netherlands as genuinely separate occasions rather than as one long festive season with two names. Sinterklaas is the day for presents, traditionally left in shoes set out by the fireplace, accompanied by small, personalised poems and a good deal of chocolate and marzipan shaped like initials and figures. Christmas Day itself, by contrast, has historically been a quieter, more explicitly religious and family-focused occasion in the Netherlands, with gift-giving playing a smaller role than it does in a British Christmas built almost entirely around the 25th. A British visitor timing a December trip around Christmas markets is, in effect, catching the tail end of the Dutch festive calendar rather than its centrepiece, though the country's town squares and canal-side stalls are dressed for the season regardless of which particular tradition a given week belongs to.

Markets built for a shorter, colder day

What British visitors recognise as a Christmas market, stalls selling mulled wine, waffles, ornaments and roasted chestnuts around a main square, is a genuine and growing part of the Dutch December, even if it borrows more directly from German and Belgian tradition than from anything native to Amsterdam itself. The city's museum squares and canal-side markets run through December into the new year, lit against the early winter dark that, at this latitude, closes in by mid-afternoon, and the canals themselves occasionally, though far from every year, freeze solidly enough for skating, a possibility every Dutch winter carries but few can actually promise.

A companion the Sinterklaas story no longer keeps

Older tellings of the Sinterklaas story included a companion figure whose depiction, rooted in nineteenth-century blackface caricature, has become the subject of sustained public debate in the Netherlands over the past decade. Many towns and broadcasters have moved to alternative depictions, soot smudges from a chimney rather than the older costume, in response to that debate, and the change is still working its way unevenly through different regions and traditions. A visitor encountering the festival for the first time may see either version depending on where and when they happen to be, a reminder that even a centuries-old children's tradition can still be genuinely under revision.

A short crossing for a short season

Because the appeal here is largely atmospheric rather than built around any single must-attend event, a short winter sailing suits the Amsterdam Christmas season particularly well: enough time for the markets and the lights on the water, without committing a full week of annual leave to a city that, in December, keeps early hours and cold evenings. Ambassador's two-night Christmas Markets Cruise – Holland and the equally brief Yuletide Delights: Amsterdam Escape both deliver a single evening and a full day in the city over the festive weeks, timed for exactly this kind of visit.

Christmas Markets of Holland & Belgium and the Christmas Markets Cruise – Holland & Belgium extend the same idea to three or four nights, adding Bruges to the itinerary for a market in a rather older setting than Amsterdam's own squares.

Anyone hoping to see Sinterklaas himself arrive will need to time a visit for mid-November rather than December, a detail few travel brochures mention and fewer British visitors think to ask about until they are already on the quayside wondering where all the presents went.