This jam takes place from 15th November 2025 at 12:01PM until 5th December at 11:59PM, and you can make anything you want - game, tabletop game, drawing, music, etc - so long as it relates to Sinterklaas!
Sinterklaas is more or less European Santa Claus. In Dutch tradition, he arrives from Spain on a huge steamboat together with his trusty horse Ozosnel and excitable and silly helpers the Petes. Together, they travel through the whole land on the night of 5th December, visiting all the well-behaved children who put out their shoe by the chimney for him to fill with sweets and gifts.
Sinterklaas arrives in the Netherlands by steamboat on 15th November and disappears in the night of the 5th of December, so the jam lasts as long as he is here.
When children put their shoes out for Sinterklaas, not only is it important to put out a carrot for his horse, it’s also customary to tuck a drawing for Sinterklaas into their shoes as a gift. In some depictions, his room in the steamboat is plastered with children’s drawings. That’s why we’re doing this jam - to share the gift of creativity with each other, and make something special for both us and Sinterklaas to enjoy! :)
If there is enough interest, I will set up a discord server for participants to chat and show off their projects as the jam progresses. We could even celebrate the end of the jam with an online get-together to admire our creations together!
- you make a creative project using Sinterklaas or something from the Sinterklaas cultural canon as a base. You can make a game, but any creative project is welcome.
- If you’re making a game, please deliver a PC build for Windows. Mac and Linux builds are up to your discretion.
- If you’re not making a game, please deliver a file format accepted by itch.io - pdfs, pngs, wavs, MP3’s, et cetera.
- Using pre-made assets is totally okay as long as you give credit to the original creator on your project page.
- This is a slow jam, feel free to work at your own pace! And working in teams or alone is all totally fine.
- I maintain a strictly no AI policy and I will reject applications that used AI in their projects.
- I will not tolerate discrimination of any kind on any basis, and especially no racist caricatures of the Pete characters.
- This is a non-ranked jam, we’re just doing this for fun!
- Sinterklaas is typically a children’s holiday so I would advise to stick to child-appropriate content guidelines, but you are ultimately free to do whatever you want with the source material.
- Should you choose to include content that is perhaps unsafe or unsavoury for children, I request you to indicate in the project title and cover image that the content is unsafe for children.
- I do not take any responsibility for children who might accidentally consume inappropriate content.
- Holiday summary: Sinterklaas lives in Spain and comes here with a steamboat (the Pakjesboot, the presents boat) in the wintertime. When he arrives, there is a huge parade and traditional sweets are thrown into the crowd. He typically takes up residence in a local government or historical building for the weeks he is here, and he makes sure to not visit the same location two years in a row. During the time he is here, he visits schools, town squares, after school clubs, et cetera, and encourages children to be on their best behaviour. They are rewarded in the mornings with gifts or treats in their shoes, leading up to a larger present on Pakjesavond, December 5th. Bad behaviour is discouraged with no gifts, or the roe, which is essentially being beaten with sticks. This doesn’t happen too much anymore. The really naughty kids can expect to be thrown in a bag and taken back to Spain with Sinterklaas, as he leaves in the dead of night. There are not many contemporary reports of this happening.
- Quirks: Sinterklaas notably rides his horse Ozosnel on the rooftops. He has a huge staff ending in a spiralled curl at the top, and carries a book with the names of well-behaved children written inside. He is relatively well-kept and has long white hair and a long white beard. He is a bit of a stately figure, but is known to make a dainty joke or two.
- Traditional foods: mostly sweet. Everyone loves kruidnoten, a small spiced round cookie, not unlike gingerbread. There is also taaitaai, a cookie with a traditional wood block mould design, which has a similar flavour but features anise more in the foreground. The same (or similar) dough is used to make smaller cookie chunks called pepernoten. All of the above can be handed out at parades or appearances or simply thrown as shrapnel.
It’s also traditional to eat or gift chocolate letters, which are A5 sized solid chocolate moulded into different letters. Typically you get the one that matches the first letter of your name. Really lucky kids, or kids with short names, get their whole name spelled out. - Historical figure: yes, Sinterklaas really existed! You can find out a lot about him online under his real name, Saint Nicolas of Myra, but I really recommend the (Dutch-Spoken, but the auto-translated English captions are pretty good) Geschiedenis Inside podcast episode covering his life, where among other things you learn that he hit a fellow priest in the face at the First Council of Nicaea to settle a theological dispute. In short, he was known to be a devout Christian and dedicated his life to secretly helping the poor and needy, without seeking acclaim for his good deeds.
- Other traditions: Sinterklaas is not owned by the Dutch! Feel free to work with different interpretations of Sinterklaas, like the Austrian Sinterklaas who works together with Krampus in what I understand to be a good cop/bad cop routine.
