Dear Friends,
December 6 is the feast day of St. Nicholas – a very real historical figure whose legends, combined with the imagination of 19th-century writers, produced our modern-day Santa Claus. The poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (attributed to Clement C. Moore, a professor of biblical languages at New York’s Episcopal General Theological Seminary) – what we sometimes call “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” – converted the bishop born in what is now Turkey to the figure of a pipe-smoking “jolly old elf.”
One legend of St. Nicholas is that he used a large inheritance from his parents to provide the dowries for three daughters of a poor man, anonymously throwing bags of gold through an open window in the man’s house. Some sources report that Nicholas’s deeds of generosity caused him to be declared a saint by acclamation long before his death in the mid-300s.
Our Episcopal Church resource, Holy Women, Holy Men, reports that ” Very little is known about the life of Nicholas, except that he suffered torture and imprisonment during the persecution under the Emperor Diocletian . . . He was honored as a saint in Constantinople in the sixth century by the Emperor Justinian . . . In England almost 400 churches were dedicated to him. Nicholas is famed as the traditional patron of seafarers and sailors, and, more especially, of children. As a bearer of gifts to children, his name was brought to America by the Dutch colonists in New York, from whom he is popularly known as Santa Claus.”
The St. Nicholas Center (http://www.stnicholascenter.org/) offers abundant information about the convergence of the bishop/saint with our Santa, as well as many resources for both children and adults. (Check out the FAQ page!)
Some families with children make a point of celebrating the bishop’s feast day by telling stories about Nicholas’s life and good deeds and by giving gold-foil-wrapped “coins.”The legends surrounding the saint provide an important balance to our secular, commercialized Christmas culture. Nicholas’s generosity was an outpouring of his love for others and a product of his love of God.
Wishing you every blessing,
Mtr. TJ