The Story of How St. Nick Got His Sleigh, Reindeer and Red Suit....and Became Santa Claus.
Santa and Pete (1999)
This warmhearted Yuletide tale tells the story of Grandpa Nichols who is spending his first Christmas alone as a widower. His grandson Pete is riveted by his grandfather's story of St. Nick, and Pete decides that it is his desire to do all he can to help out old St. Nick in any way he can.
rating 6/10 User rating 3 votes 53% ❄ Christmas Connection
Santa and Pete is built entirely around the mythology of Christmas gift-giving, tracing how Sinterklaas and his forgotten partner Pete brought their traditions from the Old World to New Amsterdam and eventually became Santa Claus. St. Nicholas's feast day on December 6 is the story's beating heart, and the film works as a direct origin-myth for the holiday we celebrate today.
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Our Review
In 1999, CBS aired a TV movie that attempted something genuinely unusual: it tried to explain where Pete came from. Not Santa. Everyone knows the Santa story. Pete, the figure at the center of the Dutch Sinterklaas tradition, the one who has generated decades of controversy in the Netherlands and beyond, the one who tends to get left out of the anglophone retelling entirely. Santa and Pete puts him front and center, framing his origin as the founding partnership of everything we call Christmas.
The premise is a classic frame story. Grandpa Nicholas, played by James Earl Jones, is spending his first Christmas as a widower. His young grandson Terence needs something to hold onto. So the old man tells a story. The story happens to be the secret history of Saint Nicholas and Pete.
The Origin Story Behind the Origin Story
The film adapts a 1998 novel by Christopher Moore and Pamela Johnson. Moore was the Commissioner of New York City Landmarks at the time of the book's publication; Johnson was a senior editor at Essence magazine. They built their story on a specific strand of Dutch folklore: Pete as a Moorish man from Spain, not a demon or a devil's servant, but a person with his own history and agency.
In their telling, Pete earned his freedom in Spain at age eighteen after years of slavery. During the Inquisition, he ended up as a jailer, and his prisoner happened to be Nicholas, a bishop accused of espionage. Pete breaks him out. The two of them make it to New Amsterdam, the Dutch colony at the tip of Manhattan, where they find a community struggling with the cold and with conflict between settlers and Native Americans.
This is a deliberate rewrite of tradition. The historical Zwarte Piet, first illustrated in an 1850 book by Amsterdam schoolteacher Jan Schenkman, was always a servant figure. Moore and Johnson made Pete an equal partner, a co-founder of the gift-giving tradition rather than an accessory to it. That's a significant creative and political choice, and the film doesn't hide it.
The Cast Doing the Heavy Lifting
Hume Cronyn plays Saint Nicholas with the kind of crinkled warmth that Cronyn could produce in his sleep by 1999. He was 88 years old when this aired. He carries the role lightly, letting Nicholas be fallible and occasionally helpless, which makes the partnership with Pete feel necessary rather than decorative.
Flex Alexander plays Pete as someone with practical energy and genuine wit. The character can't work as a symbol alone. He has to be watchable for the full runtime, and Alexander keeps him grounded. The chemistry between him and Cronyn is the film's real engine.
James Earl Jones, in the grandfather role, is essentially the film's narrator and emotional anchor. It's a contained performance, mostly set in a single house on Christmas day, but Jones makes Grandpa Nicholas's grief and his quiet determination to still mark the holiday feel real. His voice alone does considerable work.
What the Film Is Actually Arguing
The Sinterklaas tradition travels from Spain to the Netherlands to New Amsterdam, and the film argues that Pete arrived in America alongside Nicholas as a full participant, not a servant. That's a pointed argument. In the Netherlands, the Zwarte Piet debate was already active by 1999, with critics calling the blacked-up depiction of the character an insult and defenders treating it as an untouchable tradition.
The film sidesteps the blackface element entirely, which is the right call for a children's TV movie. What it offers instead is a Black character with a name, a backstory, a personality, and a reason to be in the story. Whether that's sufficient as a response to centuries of complicated folklore is a bigger question than any CBS holiday film can answer.
Director Duwayne Dunham, who cut his teeth editing Return of the Jedi before moving into television, keeps the pacing steady without letting the film get sluggish. The New Amsterdam sequences have a convincing period texture on a TV movie budget.
The Limits of the Format
The frame story works better in theory than in execution. Every time the film cuts back to Jones in the present day, the momentum of the historical narrative drops. The grandson Terence is a functional character at best. The emotional throughline about the family's first Christmas without Grandma is set up clearly but resolved quickly, which makes it feel like scaffolding around the real story rather than a parallel to it.
At roughly ninety minutes, the film doesn't have room to develop the New Amsterdam storyline as fully as it deserves. The arrival of Nicholas and Pete in America, their encounters with the community there, the gradual adoption of their gift-giving traditions: all of this is condensed into a fairly brief second act. The novel presumably had more space to breathe.
Still, for a 1999 network TV movie with a December 5 air date and a story that requires explaining the Spanish Inquisition to children, the film manages more than you'd expect. It treats its subject seriously without becoming a lecture.
Fun Facts
The film aired on CBS on December 5, 1999, the eve of Saint Nicholas Day on December 6 -- the date of the actual Sinterklaas celebration in the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Dutch Caribbean islands.
The source novel, published by Christopher Moore and Pamela Johnson in November 1998, was narrated in audiobook form by actor Delroy Lindo, adding a third prominent Black voice to the project's storytelling lineage.
The earliest known illustrated depiction of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) appears in an 1850 children's book by Amsterdam schoolteacher Jan Schenkman, titled "Sint Nikolaas en zijn Knecht" (Saint Nicholas and His Servant), making the character less than two centuries old despite being treated as ancient tradition.
Hume Cronyn, who plays Saint Nicholas, was 88 years old when the film aired in December 1999. He died in 2003 at age 91, making this one of his final screen roles.
Director Duwayne Dunham began his career as a film editor working on Return of the Jedi (1983) before transitioning to directing. He later directed the 1994 film Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco for Disney.
Saint Nicholas was a real historical figure: a Christian bishop from Myra in what is now southern Turkey, born around 270 AD. He was imprisoned during the persecutions under Emperor Diocletian before being released under Constantine the Great.
The film was shot in Los Angeles by Polson Co., with music composed by Alan Williams and cinematography by John Newby.
The DVD release of the film did not come until November 25, 2008, nearly nine years after the original broadcast -- long enough that many viewers had to rely on VHS recordings made from the original CBS airing.
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