Dear St. Luke’s,

I wanted to preface this by saying that I believe the content of this article to be true, but I know myself well enough to realize that subconsciously I am mixing up details, so if you take the time to fact-check me you will likely find many errors. I could take the time to review my sources and offer citations, but like many of you this season, time is something I don’t have. However, even if I had all of the time in the world, I probably still wouldn’t check, because I am more interested in telling a good story.

Santa Claus is real, and on a deeper level than you probably realize. It started off with Saint Nicholas, of whom we know very few things for certain. The objective facts about St. Nicholas are that he was a Bishop in Myra, which is in modern-day Türkiye during the time of the Nicaean Council, so in the 4th century. Objectively, we know that he opposed Arianism, an ancient heresy that most people don’t care about today. We also know that people liked him a lot.

Most of the good bits of his story are likely based on some truth but have transcended into myth. St. Nicholas was an advocate for the marginalized while he was Bishop, especially children, and women under threat of being forced into prostitution. A famous story that we will never be able to be confirmed is that he threw bags of gold through the window of a man who could not afford doweries for his daughters, which would have ultimately ended up with them having to fend for themselves, which back then would have meant prostitution.

There is another famous story that likely has some truth, where the good Bishop punched Arius at the council of Nicaea because Arius was spouting lies about Jesus being subject to God the Father. I know, right? Who wouldn’t want to punch the guy? That night, Mary the mother of Jesus, appeared to Nicholas, gave him back his Bishop vestments, and unlocked the door. The good Saint then apologized for the violence and successfully convinced the council that Arius was wrong and helped shape what we know as the Nicene Creed.

There are other stories that were widely believed by early Christians that are not based on actual stories, but rather relied heavily on character traits. St. Nicholas looked after children, and a story arose about an innkeeper who liked to kill, pickle and serve children to his guests to save money. When St. Nicholas arrived at his Inn, he immediately knew the evil the man committed, prayed over the barrels, and brought the children back to life. The innkeeper then either repents or is smote by God. The accounts don’t really agree on that detail. There are old icons (those fancy religious paintings of saints) that depict this story, and many of them are poorly drawn, which leads us to another category of the wonderful story of St. Nicholas; stuff that is just outright made up.

Icons were a popular and effective way of communicating about our faith partially because most people couldn’t read. St. Nicholas was the Bishop of a coastal community and a lot of illiterate sailors saw icons of St. Nicholas lifting those poor children out of the pickling barrel. Since some of these icons may have lacked realism, they thought that he was saving drowning sailors. Boom! Now, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors.

These stories were told, retold, and molded over a thousand years, and slowly Christianity began to spread to Europe, and eventually, Myra was no longer called Myra and was no longer Christian, but the story of St. Nicholas continued to grow.

St. Nicholas was generally depicted as a man with a long white beard in early icons. Do you know who else has a long white beard that people loved to tell stories about? Odin. As people who told stories about Odin (generally Germans and Scandinavians) learned about St. Nicholas and Christianity, some of the stories began to meld. Odin did things like wander through the woods, and bring yule logs into homes. He would also streak across the sky while on his Wild Hunt. If you showed an ancient Norse warrior a picture of Santa carrying a Christmas tree and going across the sky with reindeer, he would tell you that guy’s name was Odin.

Fast forward a few more centuries and an Episcopal seminary professor in New York City wrote a poem about Saint Nicholas/Santa Claus and that described a night before Christmas and how that jolly old elf and his reindeer delivered presents to people’s homes. This poem by Clement Clarke Moore is one of the best-known poems written by an American in the world and helped cement many of the traditions we observe around Christmas. Combining Saint Nicholas with Odin and focusing on gift-giving fit in nicely with capitalism, and the Santa we met as children were born.

Here is where people can get kind of judgmental with Free-Market Capitalism Santa. Santa is great at advertising, and he draws a crowd to shopping malls, where children can ask Santa for a gift, and parents are abundantly aware that those gifts can be bought on-site. It feels a bit manipulative because it is. We could completely divorce Shopping Mall Santa from the beloved Bishop that lived so long ago because he just seems so very different. If we were to make this mental division, I think we would be doing eighteen hundred years of storytelling a disservice. For good or bad, we live in a consumerist society, and we should expect the stories we love to shift ever so slightly to reflect the world we now live in. It is hard to see St. Nicholas of Myra in the Santa in the mall, but he is there and he cares for children, and often inspires sinners like you and me to be more generous.

Santa is real, and we know him today because people were not afraid to mix up details to tell a good story about a faithful Bishop that took care of his people, even the ones that had nothing to offer in return. If anyone else tells you anything contrary, remember what St. Nicholas did to heretics.

Blessings,

NicK