AMSTERDAM — St. Nicholas entered Amsterdam twice this weekend.

On Sunday morning, under a heavy November sky, he climbed off a steamboat near the Maritime Museum and then, astride a tall white horse and clad in the red-and-gold cloak and miter of a bishop, to the cheers of tens of thousands of children and their parents, he paraded into the center of town accompanied by his faithful servant, Black Peter.

Well, more accurately, servants. For surrounding St. Nicholas, who comes into Dutch cities every year at this time in a mix of Mardi Gras and Christmas to prepare for his feast day on Dec. 6, abounded hundreds of Black Petes in a swirl of activity. There are Black Petes playing music or singing; Black Petes on horseback; Black Petes on stilts handing out balloons and candy; and Black Petes scaling with ropes the facades of department stores or cavorting on the roofs of six-story buildings.

Another St. Nicholas arrived on Saturday afternoon. He sat quietly on a makeshift stage in a tiny square near the Stock Exchange, dreadlocks flowing from under his gold-and-red miter, but without Black Pete. For if Black Peter is a white Netherlander in blackface, this St. Nicholas was a member of the country’s small black minority, and he was presiding at a demonstration by several hundred people, black and white, denouncing Black Pete as racist.

The arrival of St. Nicholas, known as Sinterklaas here (the Dutch carried Sinterklaas to New Amsterdam, now New York, where it was later pronounced Santa Claus; he carries his own bags), is an event in several European countries, though only in the Netherlands and parts of Belgium is he accompanied by Black Peter, or Zwarte Piet in Dutch. Portrayed by men and women in blackface makeup, Peter sports outlandish Renaissance costumes (the kind, critics say, Renaissance lords dressed their slaves in for paintings by the old masters), with thick red lips and frizzy hairdo wigs or fake dreadlocks. Big hoop earrings were once part of the outfit, but they have been sacrificed recently in a concession to critics.