Sinterklaas

Sinterklaas is one point on the holiday calendar around which a ward conversation exposes the distance between Emma’s family life and her depression. When Karel asks how she will spend the season, Emma describes a joint Sinterklaas-and-Christmas celebration at home; the thought of family overwhelms her, but Karel’s account of his own traditions briefly draws her into a more ordinary world.

The holiday in the ward

Karel asks Emma whether she will celebrate Sinterklaas or Christmas at home, with friends or family. She first struggles to answer, then explains that her family combines the occasions: they gather at home for surprises, a Christmas tree and poems. The details sketch a familiar seasonal ritual, but the word family abruptly changes the moment. Emma cannot continue without breaking down, and Karel avoids her gaze as he turns the conversation toward his own plans.

Karel’s family calendar

Karel, a nurse in his fifties, describes a household that has stopped celebrating Sinterklaas separately and concentrates on Christmas instead. With children and their partners to bring together during an already crowded month, his family begins preparing early: they buy a tree and his wife decorates the house with wreaths and branches so that it feels like Christmas from the beginning of December. Presents and poems are part of the preparations. His daughter once wrote a ten-page poem for her brother, after which the family set a two-page limit.

The specificity of Karel’s account gives Emma something to hold on to while she listens. She can almost picture his orderly, ordinary family world, and for a short time it lets her forget her own. Sinterklaas therefore marks not just a holiday on the calendar but the point at which a conversation about seasonal customs touches Emma’s pain and then, through Karel’s memories, briefly eases it.

Calendar time and lived time

The scene’s annual landmarks sit in tension with the book’s broader account of depression and mania, in which the experience of time can cease to follow the calendar. In depression, the narrator describes the past as swallowing the future until time itself seems to disappear; in mania, the present expands until it seems to be all that matters. Against those altered states, Karel’s early-December preparations and Emma’s mention of the family gathering offer a concrete, shared sequence of days and rituals. The relief is temporary, not a cure: the scene lets Emma inhabit someone else’s seasonal world for a moment without suggesting that her own distress has passed.