St. Nicholas is the most renowned saint in Greek Orthodox tradition.
He was the Bishop of Myra in 4th century Asia Minor, imprisoned by Romans; preached against immorality and exposure of infants; defended the Trinity; confronted corrupt politicians; and was generous to the poor.
But how did Saint Nicholas turn into Santa Claus?
The story is fascinating.
In the 5th century a church was named for him in the city of Myra, modern-day Demre, Turkey. When it was damaged in an earthquake in 529 A.D., Emperor Justinian rebuilt it.
In 988 A.D., Vladimir the Great of Russia converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and adopted Nicholas as the “patron saint” of Russia.
In the 11th century, Islamist Seljuks Turks, invaded Asia Minor, killing Christians. All seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation were destroyed. Graves were desecrated.
Islamic Hadith Sahih Muslim, Book 4, Number 2115, stated: “Do not leave an image without obliterating it, or a high grave without leveling it.”
There was concern that the grave of St. Nicholas would be desecrated, as years earlier, in 846 A.D., 10,000 Muslim Saracens sailed up the Tiber River and sacked Rome, desecrating the remains of St. Peter and St. Paul. Pope Leo the Fourth responded by building a 39 foot wall around the Vatican.
In a panic, Christians shipped the remains of St. Nicholas in 1087 from Myra, Asia Minor, to the south east coast of Italy, to the town of Bari.
Pope Urban the Second dedicated the church, naming it after St. Nicholas — Basilica di San Nicola de Bari. This officially introduced the Greek St. Nicholas to Western Europe.
Turks intensified their invasion, causing so many Greek Christians to flee that Pope Urban the Second went to the Council of Claremont in 1095 and called upon European monarchs to send help.
They sent help. It was called the First Crusade.
In a backwards sense, Western Europe might not have had St. Nicholas traditions if it had not been for Islamists invading Eastern Europe.
Once St. Nicholas’ remains were in Italy, western Europeans quickly embraced the gift-giving traditions associated with him.
By 1223, so much attention was given to gift-giving during the Christmas season that the pious Saint Francis of Assisi, sort of in protest, created the first creche or nativity scene, with Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus. He wanted to get back to the real reason for the season: Jesus, the Son of God, was born in a manager.
John 1:14 declared: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Isaiah 7:14 foretold: “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.” Emmanuel means God with us!
In 1517, Martin Luther began the Reformation.
By this time, there was a saint’s day for every day of the year. Churches were filled with Saint’s statues, side altars, relics, and elaborate sepulchers.
Luther considered “saints days” a distraction from Christ, so he effectively ended them in Protestant countries, including the popular December 6th “St. Nicholas Day.”
Since Germans like the gift-giving so much, Martin Luther moved the giving to December 25th to emphasize that all gifts come from the Christ Child.
The German pronunciation of Christ Child was “Christkindl,” which over the centuries became pronounced “Kris Kringle.”
England had a different story. Henry the Eighth brought the Reformation, but not because he had a spiritual experience like Martin Luther, he just wanted another wife. He went on to have six wives.
Henry got rid of most saints days, including the popular December 6th St. Nicholas Day, but instead of focusing back on the Christ Child, as Luther did, Henry brought back an old Roman holiday – Saturnalia. Britain used to be a Roman colony since Julius Caesar first invaded in 55 B.C.
Saturn was the Roman god of feasting, plenty, and merriment.
If you remember the Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, the Ghost of Christmas Present is depicted as a big guy with robes, a wreath on his head, and a goblet of wine.
As you are looking at him, you are asking yourself, who is this guy? He sort of looks like Santa, but he also looks like a Roman god. Well, that was Saturn, but they Christianized him and called him Father Christmas. They could not call him St. Nicholas because he was outlawed by England’s Reformation.
During Henry the Eighth’s reign, Christmas in England became a party time, like Mardi Gras.
People forget that Mardi Gras originally was a religious day. It was the day before Lent, when people fasted 40 days before Easter to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus. But over time Mardi Gras became a lewd party in New Orleans.
Henry the Eighth’s Greenwich Palace Christmas Party even had a “Lord of Misrule,” similar to Mardi Gras.
During the Tudor Dynasty, Christmas in 16th century London was banquets, feasting, drinking, dancing, gaming, dicing, wassailing, court jesting, pranks, mock executions, illicit mirth, disorderly laughter, boy bishops, costumes, masks, cross-dressing, and bear-baiting.
Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night, 1601-1602, featured a carnivalesque drunken revelry based on the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia.
Puritans viewed Christmas as having become too worldly.
Puritan leader, Rev. Cotton Mather told his congregation on December 25, 1712:
“Can you in your conscience think, that our Holy Savior is honored, by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Reveling; by a Mass fit for none but a Saturn or a Bacchus, or the Night of a Mahometan Ramadan? You cannot possibly think so!
A Multitude of the Heavenly Host was heard Praising of God. But shall it be said, That at the Birth of our Savior for which we owe as high Praises to God as they can do, we take the Time to Please the Hellish Legions, and to do Actions that have much more of Hell than of Heaven in them?”
Puritans considered theaters dens of iniquity and forbade Shakespeare from mentioning God in his plays, considering it taking God’s name in vain or casting pearls before swine.
Shakespeare responded by writing plays with mythological Greek gods and fates, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1595-1596.
Puritans took over England in 1642, and forced the Shakespeare’s Globe Theater to close, and then, in 1644, pulled it down.
Puritan passed an ordinance, December 1643:
“Sins of our forefathers … have turned this feast … of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights.”
In 1647, Puritans in England outlawed Christmas.
When Pilgrims first disembarked the Mayflower, the ship master Christopher Jones wrote in his log, December 25, 1620:
“At anchor in Plymouth harbor, Christmas Day, but not observed by these colonists, they being opposed to all saints’ days, etc …
A large party went ashore this morning to fell timber and begin building. They began to erect the first house about twenty feet square for their common use, to receive them and their goods.”
A year later, at the end of 1621, Pilgrim Governor William Bradford recorded in Of Plymouth Plantation, of another boatload arriving with more settlers:
“Herewith I shall end this year – except to recall one more incident, rather amusing than serious. On Christmas Day the Governor called the people out to work as usual; but most of the new company excused themselves, and said it went against their consciences to work on that day.
So the Governor told them, if they made it a matter of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed …”
Bradford continued:
“So he went with the rest, and left them; but on returning from work at noon he found them at play in the street, some pitching the bar, some at stool-ball, and such like sports.
So he went to them and took away their games, and told them that it was against his conscience that they should play and others work.
If they made the keeping of the day a matter of devotion, let them remain in their houses; but there should be no gaming and reveling in the streets.”
In 1659, when the Puritans were settling Massachusetts, they instituted a five shilling fine for anyone caught celebrating Christmas:
“Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas and the like, either by forbearing labor, feasting … every such person so shall pay for each offense five shillings as a fine to the country.”
Where Pilgrims, Puritans and most Presbyterians did not celebrate Christmas, other immigrants did celebrate Christmas, such as Germans, French, Swedes, English, Welsh, and especially the Dutch.
Similar to the Catholic saying that St. Peter is at the Gates of Heaven, the Dutch developed a tradition based from the prophecy that Jesus will return at the end of the world to judge the living and the dead, riding a white horse, and the saints will return with him, riding white horses.
Jude 1:14: ” Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints to execute judgment.”
Revelation 19:11-16:
“And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge … He was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God …
And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.
And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.”
Revelation 19:14 described those riding with Him as dressed in: “… fine linen, clean and white … is the righteousness of the saints … And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean.”
The reasoning went, that since St. Nicholas was a saint, he would certainly be one of multitude riding white horses returning with Jesus.
But since St. Nicholas was such a special saint, the Dutch had him coming back once a year for a mini-judgement day, to check up on the children, to see if they are on the right track, see who is naughty and who is nice.
Over the centuries, the story evolved.
The angels turning into elves.
The Lamb’s Book of Life and the Books of Works were turned into the Book of the “Naughty and Nice.”
Saints came from heaven, the New Jerusalem, the Celestial City — which turned into the North Pole.
The North Pole is not far from Finnish Lapland near the Arctic Circle in the northern Scandinavian Peninsula. Since there were few horses there, St. Nicholas rode a reindeer, which then became riding in a sleigh.
Lapland’s capital is the small city of Rovaniemi, which claims the title of the “official” Santa Claus Village. Nazis destroyed Rovaniemi in World War Two, but Eleanor Roosevelt helped rebuild it, visiting there in 1950.
The Dutch holiday tradition is that St. Nicholas comes once a year to give presents to good children. But the naughty children had something else to look forward to.
St. Nicholas was accompanied by a Moorish costumed helper, Zwarte Piet, who would put naughty children into gunny sacks and take them back to Spain where they would be sold into Muslim slavery.
Many forget that Spain was controlled by Umayyad Muslim invaders for over 700 years and they sold an estimated one million Europeans into slavery.
Muslims also enslaved an estimated 180 million Africans, selling them in slave markets such as Timbuktu, Khartoum, and Zanzibar.
In Europe there were Catholic orders, such as the Trinitarians and Mercedarians, who collected donations at churches to ransom Christian slaves. Today, leaders like Eric Metaxas, are helping Christian Solidarity International raise money to ransom Christians out of slavery in Sudan.
In Holland, so dreadful was the anticipation of St. Nicholas’ visit that children would start crying.
According to anecdotal accounts, in one town, the night before his visit, Dutch boys would go to sleep with pocket knives in their pockets in case they awoke and had to cut themselves out of Zwarte Piet’s gunny sack.
Beginning in 1624, Dutch immigrants brought St. Nicholas traditions to New Amsterdam, which became New York in 1664.
Dutch called Saint Nicholas – “Sant Nikolaus” or “Sinter Klass,” which became pronounced “Santa Claus.” “Santa Claus” is the Dutch pronunciation of Saint Nicholas.
In New York, Washington Irving, considered the Father of American Literature, wrote Legend of Sleepy Hallow and Rip Van Winkle.
He coined the name “Gotham” for New York City.”
Irving was also a founding member of the St. Nicholas Society of the City of New York, 1835, to celebrate the city’s heritage.
In 1809, Irving wrote Diedrich Knickerbocker’s A History of New York.
In it, he described St. Nicholas visiting once a year, but no longer wearing a bishop’s outfit, but a typical Dutch outfit of long-trunk hose, leather belt, boots, a hat, and a pipe:
“A goodly image of St. Nicholas, equipped with a low, broad-brimmed hat, a huge pair of Flemish trunk hose, and a pipe … The good St. Nicholas, who had appeared to him in a dream the night before, and whom he had known by his broad hat, his long pipe.”
Washington Irving wrote further:
“So we are told, in the sylvan days of New Amsterdam, the good St. Nicholas would often make his appearance in his beloved city, of a holiday afternoon, riding jollily among the treetops, or over the roofs of houses, now and then drawing forth magnificent presents from his breeches pockets, and dropping them down the chimneys of his favorites …
… He never shows us the light of his countenance, nor ever visits us, save one night in the year; when he rattles down the chimneys of the descendants of the patriarchs, confining his presents merely to the children …
The good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children. And he descended hard … And he lit his pipe by the fire …
… And when St. Nicholas had smoked his pipe he twisted it in his hatband, and laying his finger beside his nose, gave … a very significant look, then mounting his wagon, he returned over the treetops and disappeared …
… The significant sign of St. Nicholas, laying his finger beside his nose and winking hard with one eye.”
Irving wrote how Dutch settlers continued the tradition of hanging stockings by the fireplace:
“At this early period was instituted that pious ceremony, still religiously observed in all our ancient families of the right breed, of hanging up a stocking in the chimney on St. Nicholas Eve;
… which stocking is always found in the morning miraculously filled; for the good St. Nicholas has ever been a great giver of gifts, particularly to children …
Nor was the day of St. Nicholas suffered to pass by without making presents, hanging the stocking in the chimney, and complying with all its other ceremonies.”
St. Nicholas is not only the patron saint of Amsterdam, Netherlands, which has the Basiliek van de Heilige Nicolaas – Basilica of Saint Nicholas, he is also the patron saint of New Amsterdam, which had the Saint Nicholas Dutch Reformed Church. Begun in 1628, it was the oldest corporate body in what is now the United States.
Irving wrote:
“Finally, that they … should not be required to acknowledge any other saint in the calendar than St. Nicholas, who should thenceforward, as before, be considered the tutelar – patron – saint of the city … They built a fair and goodly chapel within the fort, which they consecrated to his name …
… I am moreover told that there is a little legendary book somewhere extant, written in Low Dutch, which says that the image of this renowned saint, which graced the bow-sprit of the – ship – Goede Vrouw – Good Wife – was elevated in front of this chapel … the great church of St. Nicholas.”
For over three centuries, St. Nicholas Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church was the oldest congregation in Manhattan. It was moved when the British took over the city in 1664. It burned in a fire in 1741, but was rebuilt.
In 1866, the cornerstone for the church’s new location was laid at 5th Avenue and 48th street, where was built the most eminent Protestant church in the city, often referred to as “the Protestant Cathedral of New York.”
President Theodore Roosevelt attended there.
Financial mismanagement resulted in church elders selling it to the Sinclair Oil Company, which demolished it in 1949 to build an office building.
Remaining church members merged with New York’s Marble Collegiate Dutch Reformed Church at 5th Avenue and 29th Street. Motivational speaker Norman Vincent Peale was the pastor, 1933-1984, and the Trump family attended there.
In New York there was a Hebrew professor named Clement Moore who taught at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Chelsea neighborhood on land donated by the Moore family.
Clement Clarke Moore Park is located at the corner of 10th Avenue and 22nd Street. Moore helped Trinity Church establish a new church on Hudson Street – St. Luke in the Fields.
In 1823, Clement Moore wrote a poem for his six children titled “A Visit From St. Nicholas”:
‘TWAS the night before Christmas,
when all through the house,
Not 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 …”
“When, what to my wondering
eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh,
and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver,
so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment
it must be ST. NICK …”
“So up to the house-top
the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of Toys,
and ST. NICHOLAS too …”
“As I drew in my head,
and was turning around,
Down the chimney ST. NICHOLAS
came with a bound …”
Clement Moore described St. Nicholas as smaller:
“He was chubby and plump,
a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him,
in spite of myself.”
In 1843, the first lithographic Christmas cards were printed, and Charles Dickens published “A Christmas Carol,” with the characters of Scrooge and Tiny Tim.
During the Civil War, Harper’s Weekly Magazine had an illustrator named Thomas Nast, famous for creating the Republican elephant and Democrat mule in his political cartoons.
Nast drew St. Nicholas visiting Union troops with a “North Pole” sign behind St. Nick as a political jab at the Confederate South.
In the early 1900s, Haddon Sundblom was an artist famous for his creation of the Quaker Oats man and Aunt Jemima Syrup.
In 1930, Coca Cola hired Sundblom to create artwork of Santa Claus drinking Coke, which he did annually for the next 33 years.
Coca Cola pioneered mass-marketing, with it being the most well-known trademark name in the world. As a result, this version of Santa Claus became the most recognizable.
Though much has been added on to the story throughout the centuries, underneath it all, there really was a godly, courageous Christian Bishop who lived in 4th century Asia Minor, named Nicholas.
- he was a Christian;
- he loved Jesus enough go into the ministry;
- he chose being imprisoned by the Romans rather than deny his Christian faith;
- he stood for the doctrine of the Trinity;
- he preached against sexually immoral pagan temples and the killing of innocent babies;
- he confronted corrupt politicians; and
- most notably of all, St. Nicholas was very generous, giving away all his money to help the poor in their time of need, and doing it anonymously, as he wanted the credit to go, not to himself, but to God alone!
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