Sinterklaas Takes A Leap Year
How fitting that for the Hudson Valley holiday tradition that honors an animal every year, this one belonged to the frog. Sinterklaas, Rhinebeck’s annual holiday pageant, has had to leapfrog over 2020 for obvious reasons. But, like just about everything else this year, it has maintained its spirit virtually, through an animated film in which Frog makes his way into Rhinebeck to gift Sinterklaas stars throughout the Village, and to let the children know that Sinterklaas will be back in 2021.
It would have been the pageant’s 13th year, although creator Jeanne Fleming produced the first Sinterklaas 38 years ago. After a hiatus it was brought back. This year’s festivities were to happen on Dec. 5, and in an interview the next day, Fleming admitted to feeling a bit blue.
“The weather was miserable yesterday, and I felt like the world was crying,” she said. “But if we’d done the parade, it would have been ruined anyway because of the weather.”
That little bit of melancholy expressed, she had nothing but enthusiasm about the Sinterklaas movie. Fleming, a bona fide Celebration Artist, is also the artistic and producing director of the Halloween parade in New York’s Greenwich Village, so spirit is her middle name. When that procession was canceled, she commissioned artists to make puppets, then spearheaded a movie featuring a mini Halloween parade. A movie seemed the right thing to do for the canceled Sinterklaas, too.
“We have no money, but we just decided we have to do this, give children something they can hold on to,” she said. She wrote a story (“it came to me in a dream”) and gathered her team of artists: an animator (who battled COVID while working on the film), window and set designer, and composer. The 10-minute movie relates how Frog’s invitation to lead the Sinterklaas Parade had to be postponed by the cancelation of this year’s event and depicts him and his fellow creatures collecting and delivering stars to children in the Village.
The film was played on a loop in the window of Winter Sun and Summer Moon on Market Street. Richard Prouse, a Broadway set designer and painter who created the landscape in the film, fashioned the store’s enchanting window backdrop. Viewers of all ages watched the movie from outside, even at midnight in the quiet of the Village. Although the window show was taken down last weekend, the movie can (and should) be viewed online. Fleming mentioned that it reads beautifully on the phone — like a little gem.
It’s a Rhinebeck tradition for children to hold the illuminated Sinterklaas stars during the Children’s Starlight Parade, but this year, people were encouraged to put the stars in their windows. When Fleming asked Rhinebeck Responds to send a notice to their mailing list about purchasing stars (it’s normally a fundraiser for Sinterklaas), the community-supporting organization went one step further, suggesting a Buy a Star/Feed a Family effort. For every star sold, Rhinebeck Responds would put $10 in a fund to buy grocery gift cards for a local family in need. If all 2,000 Sinterklaas stars are sold, that means $200 in food support for each of 100 families.
“By saving ourselves we save so many others,” Fleming says. Good thing, that. She and her team are starting to plan next year’s Sinterklaas already. Save the date: Dec. 4, 2021.
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