Santa Claus/St Nicholas

Santa Claus, who appears all over the place at this time of year, raises so many questions. Who is he? Where on earth did he come from? Why the red suit? In this special rejesus investigation, we look at the saint behind it all, St Nick, and how he went through a makeover to become Santa Claus. The good news for children everywhere is that Santa Claus does – or at least, once did – exist. And appropriately, for someone who is said to whizz around the world once a year in a single night, the story of Santa is international – flying from Turkey to Holland and then connecting on to New York.We follow the story of this wayward saint in three easy steps, beginning in Turkey...

He was made bishop of his local city while he was still young and was imprisoned during the last great persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire. When a new emperor came to the throne, Nicholas, along with many other Christians, was released from prison.At the first big council of the church, some 10 years later, Nick landed himself in trouble when he lost his temper during a theological debate and punched a heretic on the jaw. He was sacked from being a bishop for that, but later got his job back. Modern-day Santas have sometimes been arrested for fighting each other in the streets, so maybe this is where they take their example from.The legends of Nicholas say he performed many miracles, but here's the story which made its mark on Christmas...A local family which had once been rich had fallen on hard times. This was bad news for the three daughters, as there was no chance of them getting married while they were poor.Things got so bad that the father was even thinking of putting his daughters "on the game" to raise some money, when Nicholas got to hear about it. He crept to their house one night and lobbed a small sack of gold through the window. Next morning, the family were overjoyed to find the money, which meant that one of the daughters could be married.Nicholas repeated his gold-throwing trick the next night, so that the second daughter could be married, but on the third night, he found the window was closed. So he climbed up onto the roof and dropped the gold down the chimney, where it landed in the socks the family had left to dry by the fireplace.Sounds familiar?In a darker story, Nicholas stopped at a roadside inn for the night and discovered a horrifying secret. The landlord had killed three young boys and put them in a barrel so they could be sold as meat for pies. Nicholas realised what had happened, opened the barrel and called the three boys out – and miraculously, they emerged, alive again.These old legends guaranteed that St Nick would become the patron saint of children.


Pictures were painted of St Nick, churches and babies were named after him, and the legends of his life were famous.Nicholas had also become the patron saint of many things: children, travellers, brewers, bakers, pawnbrokers, Russia, Greece... and seafarers. That last item is important for our story, because it explains why St Nick was so popular in the Low Countries (Holland and Belgium), where people lived so close to the sea and earned their living from it.Even though Nicholas was the patron saint of so many things, the church decided there was one more job he could usefully do. The people of northern Europe, who still believed in elves, fairies and goblins, also believed that one of the pagan gods came by night in the dead of winter to deliver them presents. The church decided that rather than abolish this superstition, St Nick could take it on.It was in Holland that St Nick picked up the name Sinterklaas, and his feast day (December 6th) became a day when small children were given presents of gingerbread or small toys. The children left hay, carrots or turnips in their shoes for Sinterklaas's horse, and the next morning they would find their shoes empty, and little presents left in their place.Sinterklaas was said to give good children rewards and bad children punishments. The line, "He's gonna find out who's naughty and nice," from the song, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," goes back a long, long way.In those days, though, Sinterklaas was said to travel from Spain, rather than from the North Pole. Dutch children still welcome his arrival on a steamboat from Spain in mid-November, in time for his feast day on December 6th.When the Protestant Reformation came to Europe in the 16th century, the celebration of St Nick, along with all the other saints, was banned in many Protestant countries. But by then, he had grown so popular that most people simply moved his celebration forward three weeks, so that he brought his gifts on Christmas Eve, rather than December 6th.

The first Europeans who settled in what is now New York were Dutch traders, and they named their settlement New Amsterdam. And naturally, they brought all the customs of the old country with them, including good old Sinterklaass.After just 40 years, the Dutch colony was captured by the British and renamed New York. The customs surrounding Sinterklaas were taken up by the British colonists and his name gradually changed to Santa Claus.Two more developments put the icing on Santa's cake. On Christmas Eve 1822, Clement Clarke Moore, a wealthy landowner in New York, went out on his chauffeur-driven sleigh to fetch an extra turkey for Christmas. As he was driven, with the jingle-jingle of the sleigh bells in his ears, he started writing a poem that quickly became the poem about Santa Claus...'Twas the night before Christmas,when all through the houseNot a creature was stirring – not even a mouse;The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there...The poem, called A Visit from St Nicholas, was hugely popular and contained lots of the Christmassy details about Santa: he arrives on the rooftop in a sleigh drawn by eight tiny reindeer (Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen); he leaps down the chimney with a bundle of toys in a sack on his back; and he looks just like any modern Santa...He had a broad face and a little round belly,That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself...Clement Moore had basically turned St Nick into a Dutch elf and had de-Christianized him in the process! He was now as pagan a figure as he had ever been in northern Europe – the magical figure who turns up in the dead of winter bearing gifts.It took only one more step for St Nick to become Santa Claus, and that was done in the mid 19th century by a New York illustrator, Thomas Nast, who drew Santa with his rotund figure, tunic and trousers, and jolly, ho-ho-ho face (as seen in the picture at the top of this page). Nast also gave Santa his home at the North Pole, and came up with the idea of Santa's toy workshop, staffed by elves.Today, children all over the world write to "Santa Claus, North Pole" at Christmas, and it's estimated that there might be as many as 1 million such letters posted each year. And some 20,000 people go to meet Santa in Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland, inside the Arctic Circle.

Today there is a worldwide movement to reclaim the Christian saint from the clutch of Christmas comercialism. This sermon extract is a good example:

"For one about whom so little is known, much has been expected. Indeed, Nicholas of Myra has become for us the most popular of saints. He is the only saint, as I discovered in my childhood, one need not be a Christian to venerate. He is, after all, Santa Claus.
Advent is a time of repentance, a time to dismantle, to demolish, to prepare the way. It is a time when we are asked to hold a mirror up to ourselves and see if the reflection in it reveals who we are called to be. If we are unsure, let us take as our example good St Nick. In whatever he did Nicholas reflected most clearly the call of all us to be 'other Christs'. And that possibility, as Nicholas himself has shown us, is there, hidden in each of us like a Christmas surprise. It is there because God put it there. God is, after all, the giver of all good gifts, the one who can turn a baby into a saviour, an obscure fourth century bishop into Santa Claus, and all of us into the saints of God."
Mirror of God's Love by Rachelle Birnbaum