Who the Heck is Santa?
St. Nicholas of Myra (“Santa Claus”), A.D. 270-346.
(Listen to an audio version of the blog above!)
Christmas is just around the corner, and as I’ve stressed throughout Advent, Christmas is a time to remember God taking our humanity in the person of Jesus Christ and living among us, a time to welcome him anew into our lives.
Here in southern California the shopping malls began hawking their “holiday” fare shortly after Halloween, intensifying their “ho, ho, ho” advertising on “Black Friday,” and cranking up the volume with each Advent candle lit. In every shopping mall Santas appeared: fat ones, skinny ones; old ones, young ones; some with laughably goofy beards and polyester suits; and others with genuine white whiskers and velvet outfits. For most of America, Christmas is not about Christ coming into the world; it is about buying stuff. And Santa is the pitchman.
So just who is this Santa and where did he come from?
St. Nicholas—or Santa—lived from about A.D. 270-346. He was the bishop of Myra, or Lycia in modern-day Turkey (where Timothy, Paul’s young protégé, lived). A kind man, Nicholas had a reputation for helping those in need. Many stories are associated with him—mostly legends and folklore. One story tells of a poor man who had three daughters, but he could not afford a dowry for them. Without husbands, they would be forlorn and struggle to survive. To save the man from the humiliation of taking charity, Nicholas provided a sack of gold for each daughter when she “came of age,” enabling her father to marry his daughters to men of quality and substance. One version of the story has Nicholas coming to the man’s house under cover of night and tossing the sacks of gold through the window into the house. Another has him coming on three consecutive nights: the first two nights he throws the sacks through the window, but on the third night he drops a sack down the chimney, since their father is in hiding, watching to identify the anonymous gift-giver. In this story, the sack that goes down the chimney falls into a stocking that the girls had hanging on the fireplace to dry.
A second story tells of a terrible famine, during which a local butcher lures three children into his shop, murders them, and places their bodies in a pickling barrel, planning to sell them as ham. St. Nicholas exposes the crime, prays for the children, and God raises them from the dead, giving them back to their parents.
Yet another story finds St. Nicholas putting gold coins into the shoes of poor children at the foot of their beds while they sleep.
After his death, the villagers of Myra continued giving anonymous gifts in his memory, and the legend of St. Nicholas took hold and spread throughout the Christian world. His feast day is December 6th in both the Western and Eastern churches and it is a traditional festival for children, marked by the giving of gifts. The name “Santa Clause” is derived from the Dutch rendering of St. Nicholas—“Sinterklaas.”
Traditional iconography of the Eastern Orthodox churches features St. Nicholas as an older man with a white beard, wearing a bishop’s mitre and holding a crozier and a copy of the Gospels, as in the Russian icon above from the Church of St. Nicholas on Lipno Island in Novgorod, Russia (the icon was painted by Aleksa Petrov in 1294). Frequently, such icons as this include either three golden sacks or balls, remembering the three sacks of gold given to the poor man as dowry for his three daughters, or three children in a pickling barrel. Oddly, over time St. Nicholas became the patron saint of pawnbrokers; thus, the three golden balls displayed at pawnshops!
We may have corrupted the legend of St. Nicholas in our day, turning him into a shopping mall Santa with a fake beard and a cheap, red suit, hawking toys and video games. But that’s a cynical image, spawned by our materialistic and shallow culture.
The real story of Santa— St. Nicholas, the bishop of Myra—is something else entirely. The Church is a big family with a long and colorful history. And like any family it has its share of tall tales and legends, tales of rascals and rogues, heroes and villains. But they are stories told fondly and remembered with love. Understanding the history, stories and legends of our past enriches our present and brightens our future.
And that is a gift to treasure this Christmas.