The original Santa Claus
by Mike Oettle
YOU won’t find
Nicholas[1] of Myra on the latest Church calendars; indeed, the Roman Catholic Church in 1969 dropped his feast day and moved it, with several others, to 1 January.
Yet he is a hard saint to forget – indeed, the secular
world seems at times to have made him the god of Christmas! And at a time of
year when Advent is altogether forgotten in a mad frenzy of Christmas
celebrations that seem to start in mid-November, it’s perhaps a useful excuse
to be able to get someone in a Santa Claus suit to give out presents on 6
December and to cover it by saying: “Well, it is St Nicholas’s Day, after all!”
Sad to say, a great deal more is told about Nicholas than
is known for certain, for he has had many legends woven about his name. What is
known is that he was bishop of the city of Myra, then one of the chief cities
of the province of Lycia, in Asia Minor. (The ruins of Myra are today to be
found near the Turkish village of Demre, some 150 km east of the Greek island of Rhodes.)
As Bishop of Myra, Nicholas attended the first Council of
Nicea, near what became Constantinople, in AD 325, and it is believed he died
a year or two later. He was apparently born in Patara, Lycia (now Kalamaki,
Turkey) and travelled to Palestine and Egypt as a young man, being elected
bishop shortly after his return to Lycia.
During the Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of the Church
(which began in 303 and ended with his abdication in 305), Nicholas was
imprisoned and was in all likelihood not released until about the time of the
Emperor Constantine’s victory in the East in 324.
Perhaps the most popular of the legends about Nicholas is
the one of the impoverished and widowed nobleman who could barely provide
necessities, let alone dowries, for his three daughters. On three successive
nights Nicholas threw a bag of gold into the house, whereby the daughters were
able to marry wealthy husbands. The three bags are rendered symbolically as
three golden balls representing Nicholas; he is the patron saint of
pawnbrokers, who use this badge (unwittingly, most of the time) to identify
their businesses.
He is also patron of sailors because of an incident on
his journey to the Holy Land in which his prayers reportedly calmed a storm,
saving the vessel from shipwreck and miraculously restoring a drowned sailor
to life. A popular picture shows Nicholas in his bishop’s robes and mitre,
floating horizontally in the sky above a stormy sea and a boat in distress.
(Of course, this is inaccurate, since Nicholas had not yet become a bishop when
he undertook that journey.)
He is often also shown blessing three naked boys in a
tub: during a famine, three boys were allegedly killed, cut up and salted down
to be served as food by an evil innkeeper before Nicholas restored them to
life.
He is also believed to have appeared to Constantine in a dream, appealing for mercy for three officers condemned to death – naturally, they were reprieved.
Nicholas became an extremely popular saint during the
Middle Ages, and has given his name to more churches in England than any other
saint. Derived from his name are the English surnames Nicholls, Nicholson,
Colson and Collins. He is patron of both Greece and Russia and of cities such
as Fribourg in Switzerland, and Moscow.
Shortening his name has given us the more
Germanic-sounding Claes, Claas, Klaas and Claus.
A popular event on St Nicholas Day in many parts of
England and Europe was the election of a boy bishop who reigned until Holy
Innocents Day (28 December).
Nicholas’s remains were eventually stolen from the church
at Myra in 1087 and taken to Bari, in Italy, where they lie in the 11th-century
basilica of San Nicola – naturally a popular centre for pilgrimages.
Nicholas’s legend, too, was stolen, in a sense, after the
Reformation, when Protestant Germans and Dutch – and eventually the French,
too – took to celebrating him as Father Christmas or Father January, on 25
December or 1 January.
The Dutch called him Sinter Claes – but it must be
admitted that the idea of Sinter Claes is older than the Reformation. To this
day it is customary in Holland and Zeeland for the old bishop to arrive by ship
“from Spain” on 6 December – surely something that dates back to when the ruler
of the Netherlands was the King of Spain. He is accompanied by his assistant,
Zwarte Piet. Piet carries a bag of coal, and his job is to give naughty
children a lump of the black stuff.
The English settlers in North America took the Sinter
Claes idea over from the Dutch when Nieuw Amsterdam became New York – and Santa
Claus began to reign supreme at Christmas.
Perhaps if we restore to him his traditional date of 6
December, and think of him as a bishop with a mitre on his head, we could get
away from that silly image of a “right jolly old elf” in a red suit with white
fur trimmings that Clement C Moore gave us in his poem The Night before
Christmas[2] – what could be more ridiculous in a hot Mediterranean land than a fellow like that riding a sleigh drawn by reindeer!
Perhaps, also, we might then be able to put Christ alone
back into the popular image of Christmas.
