Blog · October 24, 2026 · 5 min read

Saint Nicholas Day Traditions for Kids: A Simple Guide

Saint Nicholas Day falls on December 6, and most families celebrate it the night before: children set out a shoe or boot on the evening of December 5 and find small treats inside the next morning ¹. The day honors Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop in Myra, in what is now southern Turkey, who became known for quiet, generous giving ¹². You don’t need much to start, either. One shoe by the door, a few chocolate coins, an orange, and a short note make a complete tradition.

Who Saint Nicholas was, in kid-sized words

Nicholas served as a bishop in the city of Myra, and he died on December 6 in the year 343, which is why his feast day lands on that date ². Christians have honored him as a saint ever since, and he is remembered as a patron saint of children and sailors ¹.

The story most families tell is about three sisters whose father was too poor to give them dowries, which meant they could not marry. On three separate nights, a bag of gold appeared in their home, tossed through an open window, and the bags are said to have landed in stockings or shoes left by the fire to dry ². That’s where the shoe custom comes from, and it’s a lovely thing to tell a four-year-old: he gave in secret, and he gave to people who needed it.

When Dutch families settled in America, they brought their name for him, Sinter Klaas, and over time that name turned into Santa Claus ³. So Saint Nicholas Day isn’t a competitor to Christmas. It’s the older root of it.

The shoe tradition, step by step

This is the heart of the day, and it takes about ten minutes to set up. Here’s how most families run it.

• After dinner on December 5, each child picks one shoe or boot and sets it by the door, the fireplace, or the bottom of the stairs.
• Kids polish or wipe the shoe first. Children in some places leave a carrot or a bit of hay for Saint Nicholas’s horse, so a carrot in or beside the shoe fits the tradition ¹.
• Let your child tuck in a drawing or a short note if they want to ⁴.
• After bedtime, fill the shoe. Small is the rule, since Christmas is three weeks away.
• In the morning, let the kids find the shoes before the school rush starts.
• If you have a child who wakes up at 5 a.m., set a house rule the night before: shoes stay where they are until everybody’s awake.

What to put in the shoe

Traditional fillings are simple and mostly edible. Nuts, oranges, and chocolates were the classics for generations of families, and coins and candy still show up most often ⁵⁶. A single small object, like a matchbox car or a pack of stickers, is plenty alongside them.

A few combinations that work well:

• An orange or a clementine, three chocolate coins, and a candy cane.
• A pair of warm socks rolled into the shoe, plus a chocolate letter in the child’s initial.
• A new holiday book, a pack of crayons, and a printed page or two from the winter coloring pages.
• Hot cocoa mix in a jar with a note that says tonight is a cocoa night.
• A small bag of nuts in the shell and a nutcracker to share at the table.
• For a child who already has plenty, a ticket: one trip to the library, one movie night, one morning of pancakes.

How other families celebrate

Borrowing one custom from somewhere else is a nice way to teach a little geography without a worksheet.

In the Netherlands and Belgium, the big night is December 5, called pakjesavond, or presents eve ⁷. Children set out a shoe by the fireplace in the days beforehand, leave a carrot for Sinterklaas’s white horse, and sing songs by the hearth ⁴⁷. In the Dutch telling, Sinterklaas arrives by boat from Spain a few weeks early and stays until his birthday on December 6 ⁸. Families often wrap gifts inside homemade contraptions and write teasing poems to go with them, which older kids love.

Closer to home, Milwaukee is famous for St. Nick’s Day. Children there leave out shoes or stockings on December 5 and find them filled the next morning, and sometimes the pets get a shoe set out too ⁵.

Giving, not just getting

Every story about Nicholas is a story about somebody else’s need being met quietly ². If you want the day to mean something beyond candy, pair the shoe with one act of generosity. Catholic parishes often describe this part of the day as doing acts of kindness and giving to people in need ⁶.

Ideas that work with young kids:

• Fill a second pair of shoes or boots with socks, hats, and gloves, and drop them at a shelter or coat drive.
• Let each child choose one good toy to pass on, wrapped and ready.
• Bake cookies and leave a plate on a neighbor’s step without saying who it’s from. The secrecy is the point, and kids find it thrilling.
• Put coins in a jar all week and let your child hand the jar over at a food bank.
• Write one anonymous thank-you note to somebody who works hard and never hears it: a bus driver, a crossing guard, a school custodian.

A cozy December 5 evening at home

You can make the whole thing an evening instead of a morning surprise. Keep it low-effort so you’ll actually do it again next year.

Spiced cookies are the classic bake for the day ⁶, and store-bought speculaas cookies from the international aisle count. Serve cocoa, put on music, and read one Saint Nicholas story. Then everyone polishes a shoe and lines them up in a row, biggest to smallest, which is a photo worth taking.

If your kids are old enough to help, let them be the ones who fill a younger sibling’s shoe. Being on the giving side of the secret is the best possible introduction to how all of this works.

If your child asks whether Saint Nicholas is Santa

Sooner or later, somebody will ask. The honest answer is also the warmest one: they’re the same person, grown through hundreds of years of storytelling and a Dutch nickname that American tongues turned into Santa Claus ³.

For a younger child, that’s enough. For an older one who’s testing the ice, you can say that Saint Nicholas was a real man who gave in secret, and that every parent who fills a shoe at night is carrying on what he started. If you’d like a longer script for that conversation, we wrote one in is Santa real: what to say.

Keeping the day

Take one photo of the shoes in the morning and one of your child holding the orange. Write down what they said when they found it, because that’s the part you’ll forget by next December.

If you’d like something to find in the shoe itself, you can make a letter from Saint Nicholas or a letter from Sinterklaas with your child’s name in it, and keep the photos in a holiday scrapbook page. A couple of winter coloring pages tucked in the shoe will buy you twenty quiet minutes, too.