This may be a bit of my recent problems contributing to my thoughts here. For 2e children (my own in particular) montessori may not be a good fit. Your comment about giving easier work to build self-esteem makes me very nervous. My son was in a montessori program for 2 years. The solution to all of his problems according to the school was to keep him doing simple work until he did it perfectly for several weeks at a time to build self esteem. What this did was actually destroy his remaining self confidence and convince himself that he was "stupid". He actually regressed rather than learned. His achievement level scores in Math at age 5 put him at the 6.5 grade level. This past summer(age 8) he scored at the 3.8 level on the Math Fluency subset.
On the Sinterklaas topic. At age 4, my son refused to sit on Santa's lap for pictures since it was a stranger dressed up like Santa. "And Mom, you always tell me not to go with strangers or tell them my name." Well at that point we were pretty sure that he had a handle on the truth about Santa. So we talked alot of about the magic of Christmas and how being a "santa" helped to make the season brighter for all of us. We really stressed that everyone should be able to enjoy the "magic" in their own way. If that meant that they completely believed in the Man in the Red Suit then he needed to go along with them. We also got into a lot of religious conversations but since I'm sure all of us have a lot of different views I'll not go into those
