Long ago and far away—in the third century and in the seaside village of Patara in Lycia, a Hellenic Greek province within the Roman Empire (today’s Turkey)—a lad named Nicholas was born to wealthy parents. An exceedingly holy baby (on Fridays he refused his mother’s milk), Nicholas lost his parents in a plague and was left alone to wander his part of the world, conquering it with good works. Still youthful, he became bishop of Myra (today’s Demre), a town on the Turkish Riviera.
In the year 325, Nicholas either did or didn’t attend the Council of Nicaea, convened by the Emperor Constantine to tackle such tricky thickets as the dates of Easter, that moveable feast. If he did attend, that followed his martyrdom during the Diocletian persecutions. Nicholas died on December 6, 343, in Myra (today’s Iznik) and was buried in his cathedral church.
Man into myth: As bishop, Nicholas learned of a poor fellow with three daughters who could not afford the dowries that would assure them proper marriages, thus condemning them to slavery and/or prostitution. The three bags of gold that somehow flew through the cottage windows saved the daughters from a dreadful fate and have become the three spheres that symbolize a pawnbroker’s shop. At times, the bags of gold landed in stockings left before the fire to dry, which we commemorate when we attach Christmas stockings to a mantelpiece on December 24.
Nicholas became a world traveler after his death, and a saint by any other name, such as Père Noël, Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, Viejo Pascuero (Chile), Babbo Natale (Italy), Joulupukki (Finland), San Niklaw (Malta), Święty Mikolaj (Poland), Nikό Λaoç (Greek, or Nike Laus, victory to the people), or even Baba Chaghaloo (Afghanistan).
When Nicholas arrived in the New World in the 1600s, the Puritans made it illegal to mention his name and did not allow exchanging of gifts, lighting of symbolic candles, or singing carols. (Stingy old Puritans.) By the 1770s, however, Dutch settlers had imported Sinterklaas as well as juniper-flavored Jenever.
In 1773, so ’tis said, Santa first appeared in the media as St. A. Claus. By 1804, the New York Historical Society was founded with St. Nicolas as its patron saint (I don’t know what happened to the “h”).
Washington Irving, employing the byline Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809, portrayed St. Nicolas riding into town on a horse, and by 1822 a dentist named Clement Clarke Moore was credited with writing a poem now known as “The Night Before Christmas,” in which an elfin Santa flew above town steering a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer.
St. Nick as pitchman is a succès fou. In 1939, he became a poster boy for Coca-Cola; Johnny Marks’s 1949 “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is the second most popular song ever, right after “White Christmas.”
Brush up on your saints-sphere: Nicholas is the patron of bakers, brides, children, pawnbrokers, prisoners, storm-beset sailors, and travelers, not to mention Greece and Russia. Feliz navidad!
