Who Was the Real Saint Nicholas? The Bishop Behind Santa Claus
Long before the red suit, he was a bishop who gave in secret.
Ask a child who Santa Claus is and you will get a confident answer. Ask who Saint Nicholas was, and the story turns out to be older, quieter, and in some ways more interesting.
A real bishop of Myra
Nicholas was born around the year 270 in what is now Turkey, and he became the bishop of a seaport town called Myra. He lived through the last great Roman persecution of Christians and into the age of Constantine, when the faith was finally free. Very little that he wrote survives, but one thing about him was never forgotten: he gave, and he did not want to be seen doing it.
The gift in the night
The story that made him beloved is a small one. A poor man had three daughters and no money for their dowries. According to a much-loved tradition, Nicholas came by night and tossed a bag of gold through the window, enough for the first daughter, and came back twice more for the others. When the father finally caught him, Nicholas asked him to tell no one.
From that one gesture grew almost everything else: his patronage of children, the three gold balls that mark him in art, and, over many centuries, the whole idea of the secret Christmas giver.
From Myra to the North Pole
Here is where history and legend part ways, and it is worth being honest with children about it. The Dutch kept Nicholas’s feast as Sinterklaas, a gift-bringing bishop, and carried the custom to New Amsterdam, the city that became New York. A poem in 1823 gave him reindeer and a sleigh, and later illustrators gave him the round, red-suited shape we know.
So Santa Claus is real the way a great-grandchild is real: a cultural descendant of a bishop of Myra. Pull the thread all the way back, though, and you reach something true. A man who gave in secret, and asked that no one be told.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.