What St. Nicholas Brings

The December 20, 1773 edition of the New-York Gazette, printed and published by Irish immigrant Hugh Gaine, included an announcement: “Last Monday the Anniversary of St. Nicholas, otherwise called Saint-A Claus, was celebrated at Protestant-Hall, at Mr. Waldron’s, where a great Number of the Sons of that ancient Saint celebrated the Day with great Joy and Festivity.” The first American mention of Santa Claus occurred in the days following the Boston Tea Party; a time of unrest that would lead to revolution. The confluence is more than a historical quirk: Santa Claus is inextricable from America.

Historian Charles W. Jones notes that St. Nicholas was of particular importance to John Pintard, the influential merchant. Pintard’s devotion to the saint was not merely spiritual; Nicholas was a patriotic symbol. When Pintard founded the New York Historical Society in 1804, Nicholas practically became their patron saint. Their banquet toast: “To the memory of St. Nicholas. May the virtuous habits and simple manners of our Dutch ancestors be not lost in the luxuries and refinements of the present time.”

At the annual banquet of 1809, the group invited none other than Washington Irving to become a member. Then an emerging writer, Irving would reach greater acclaim later that year, with the publication of A History of New York, a satirical work that he wrote under a pseudonym. St. Nicholas, he wrote, was “the tutelar saint of this excellent city.” When Irving revised the book, he expanded the section on the saint, having him appear in a dream to Olof Van Cortlandt, the first of his family to reach America: “Lo, 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.” When St. Nicholas landed, he “lit his pipe by the fire, and sat himself down and smoked; and as he smoked the smoke from his pipe ascended into the air and spread like a cloud over head.” The plume continued to rise and “assumed a variety of marvellous forms, wherein in dim obscurity he saw shadowed out palaces and domes and lofty spires.” The oneiric topography, according to the tale, guided Van Cortlandt’s eventual settling of New York City.

Irving’s jocular imagination would go on to form the foundation for our contemporary view of Santa Claus. In the years to follow, American writers would further erase the saint from the burgeoning symbol. In 1821, another New Yorker, the printer William B. Gilley, published “The Children’s Friend Number III: A New-Year’s Present to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve,” an illustrated children’s poem:

Old Santeclaus with much delight
His reindeer drives this frosty night,
O’er chimneytops, and tracks of snow,
To bring his yearly gifts to you.

Although he is described as “The steady friend of virtuous youth, / The friend of duty and of truth,” the Christmas visitor is rather stern. The poem ends:

But where I found the children naughty,
In manners rude, in temper haughty,
Thankless to parents, liars, swearers,
Boxers, or cheats, or base tale-bearers,

I left a long, black, birchen rod
Such as the dread command of God
Directs a Parent’s hand to use
When virtue’s path his sons refuse.

An image of the rod on the final page of the booklet serves as a warning: You better watch out, you better not cry.

Although it concludes on a joyless note, the anonymous poem made the rounds. Two years later, O.L. Holley, the editor of the Troy Sentinel in upstate New York, shared another anonymous poem with his own readers in the final issue of the newspaper before Christmas. In his editor’s note, Holley replicates the unusual Sante spelling, indicating that he was familiar with the previous poem. Holley’s framing, though, is festive rather than taciturn: “There is, to our apprehension, a spirit of cordial goodness in it, a playfulness of fancy, and a benevolent alacrity, to enter into the feelings and promote the simple pleasures of children, which are altogether charming.” Holley hoped the poem would focus attention on “those unbought, homebred joys, which derive their flavor from filial piety and fraternal love.”

The poem “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas” begins: “’Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” The now-famous poem is in the lineage of the previous verse, but much more festive and skilled. Clement C. Moore, an accomplished professor at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, was ultimately revealed to be the author, and historians have linked Gilley and Moore (Gilley’s print shop was across the street from Moore’s church). Moore’s poem cemented the prototypical traits of Santa Claus — driven by reindeer, coming down the chimney, “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,” carrying a “bundle of toys” — by synthesizing the various literary traditions. Perhaps most importantly, Santa Claus and St. Nicholas were now inextricable: as characters, images, and stories. Nearly a hundred years after this benign poem, we should consider the unfortunate theological result of intertwining Santa and Nicholas. It’s time for a recasting of the legacy of St. Nicholas — for our spiritual good.

For some, Santa Claus is less a jaunty visitor and more a seasonal distraction; or worse, a figure antithetical to Christ. His generosity with gifts creates expectations for children that their parents must reconcile. Christ spoke in parables; he acted in miracles. In both, the Son of God was suffused with mystery. In contrast, Santa Claus is as literal as they come. We make a list, and so does he (and he even checks it twice). His arrivals are regular, and his deliveries are expected. He offers no ambiguities. Even his central admonition — that we be good boys and girls — feels more like the reminder of a stern elder than a loving soul.

Of course, all this can sound like humbug. Yet for some Christians, it is difficult to prepare for the arrival of a man and a child — when they seem to represent such differences. Christmas already has Christ. Why would it need someone else?

For someone named Nicholas, it took a long time for me to actually dress the part. While my wife distracted our daughters, I changed in the laundry room and then snuck my way near the fireplace. I gave each of my girls a hug, but my wife and I noticed that one daughter held her gaze on my face a bit longer. I confess that I am partial to the alleged powers — intuitive and otherwise — of identical twins, so I would not be surprised if at least one of my little girls was suspicious that night. After silently waving them upstairs to bed, I disappeared and hid my costume. The next morning, they told me that Santa had come to visit them on his journey. On Christmas day, there were no second or skeptical glances: only torn wrapping paper and clenched gifts.

We know that Christmas is a special season for children. We can recall our own memories, and we can feel young again through children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. We should embrace those associations. Advent is a magical season. Lights string from trees and roofs, casting a white and yellow glow on the cold nights. Trees — the wildness of creation — enter our homes. Families travel to reunite. Our hearts soften for sentimental songs and movies. Churches adorn with wreaths and red poinsettias. The religious and secular worlds transform. Although we might bemoan the commercial nature of much of that transformation, we should not ignore its palpable and positive spiritual shift.

Advent is not merely a season of anticipation, it is a season of preparation. Anticipation can be a strong emotion, but it can often occur passively. We might wait in complacency, or even worse, impatiently. Preparation, in contrast, requires our active presence. We are getting ready for Christ’s arrival.

The Irish poet Michael Longley has a wonderful short poem, “Birth,” that encapsulates the season: “The cosmos-shaper has come down to earth: / Mary is counting his fingers and toes.” There’s a confident simplicity to that single couplet. “Cosmos-shaper” is a startling, yet perfect, phrase. How else could we understand Christ? To shape means to influence, certainly, but it also carries a tactile sense; we might imagine the scene from John’s Gospel. “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” How Christ “spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva, and smeared the clay” on the eyes of the blind man. He shapes us, sometimes, by directly touching us.

Longley’s poem juxtaposes that power with the gentle, fragile infant Christ. Mary, eternal mother, is also very much a human mother. In counting his fingers and toes, she is exercising instinct and caution, but also affirming her son’s corporal form. Christ is with us as one of us: flesh and blood.

Although I appreciate the power of Longley’s poem to remind us of the center of the season, I think another literary example captures a challenging reality of Christmas. Americana, the debut novel from Don DeLillo, appeared in 1971. Although perhaps the least religiously haunted of DeLillo’s novels, the book’s opening paragraph captures Advent’s paradoxical atmosphere in America. “Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year,” DeLillo begins. “Lights were strung across the front of every shop. Men selling chestnuts wheeled their smoky carts.”

Amidst the hazy atmosphere, comes: “the santas of Fifth Avenue rang their little bells with an odd sad delicacy, as if sprinkling salt on some brutally spoiled piece of meat. Music came from all the stores in jingles, chants and hosannas, and from the Salvation Army bands came the martial trumpet lament of ancient Christian legions.”

The novel’s narrator affirms the surreal atmosphere: “It was a strange sound to hear in that time and place, the smack of cymbals and high-collared drums, a suggestion that children were being scolded for a bottomless sin, and it seemed to annoy people.” DeLillo leaves his Christmas scene after this single paragraph, but its brevity belies its significance. In a novel titled Americana — written by the son of immigrants — DeLillo opens with a Christ-less scene of Christmas. The scene of the holiday gestures toward its commercial underbelly here, but more so its discontent than its bounty. It is perhaps too easy to criticize the absurd commercial pomp of the season. Of greater concern is a Christmas with a hidden Christ. However comforting the images and associations of Santa Claus, a Christmas with an eye toward the real St. Nicholas is one that can bring us closer to Christ.

The challenge in recasting St. Nicholas is the mystery of that ancient saint. His biography is spare, especially difficult to reconstruct in the light of early and strong hagiography that helped his veneration spread around the world. Yet that mystery might also be a blessing. Rediscovering St. Nicholas is worth our effort.

The Nicholas who would become a saint was likely born in the late third century in Patara, within Asia Minor — now modern-day Turkey. Born to wealth, he gave up his worldly inheritances upon the death of his parents, and ultimately became the bishop of Myra, a seaport city 50 kilometers to the east of his birthplace.

The earliest historical account of Nicholas is known as Stratelatis, commonly translated from the Greek as “military generals.” Widely circulated in the seventh century, some date its origin as early as the fifth or sixth centuries. A dramatic story, it is not difficult to see how the account contributed to the rise of Nicholas’ stature.

From Charles W. Jones’ translation of the Latin: In the time of Constantine, three military officers dock with their soldiers at Andriake, the port area of Myra. Some men leave the shore “to find food and recreation.” Unfortunately, some criminals in the city impersonate the outsiders in hopes of evading capture. Riots follow, and three soldiers are engulfed in the mob. Linen cloths are draped over their heads; their hands are chained behind their back. An executioner is before them, ready with his sword.

Nicholas intervenes. He snatches away the sword and frees the soldiers. The biographer likens his actions to Proverbs 28: “The righteous are bold as a lion.”

Yet upon returning home, the officers in charge of these soldiers are subject to scandal — and Constantine himself orders their execution. The condemned men pray for the intercession of Nicholas. That night, he appears in a vision to Constantine. Nicholas compels the emperor to “rise and free those three men,” and if he did not, Nicholas would bear “witness against you before the celestial King Christ.”

Confused and shaken, Constantine frees the men, but tells them: “Now understand this, it is not I who have granted to you your life, but he whom you did invoke, St. Nicholas, to whom you are devoted. Cut the hair of your head, and don your proper uniforms. Then render thanks to him. And be charitable toward me.” Armed with holy gifts of gold and precious stones, the men return to Myra, where they started the veneration for Nicholas.

In light of the account, Jones, a sober medievalist at the University of California, Berkeley, dubbed Nicholas “the people’s champion and victor against an overweening establishment.” His “virtue” was greater than his “prelacy.” While the prototypical saint was ascetic, Nicholas stood out: “No recluse, no scholar, not even overtly a man of prayer, he is instantly alert to the safety and well-being of his innocent lambs.”

Constantine’s vision oddly presages Washington Irving’s dream sequence. The life and legend of St. Nicholas are replete with such coincidences. According to tradition and legend, Nicholas was present at the Council of Nicaea — and some stories even claim that he slapped Arius, who there made heretical claims. The strike is pure hagiography, but Jones and other scholars have long doubted the claims about Nicholas at Nicaea altogether, until a Dominican friar, Father Gerardo Cioffari, discovered Nicholas’ name on several lists of attendees. Fiction often becomes fact in the life of St. Nicholas.

However slight, most biographical accounts document Nicholas’ pastoral, political, and ecclesiastical life. He clearly was a man of virtue — but a giver of gifts? That element of his legend was popularized in an account by Michael the Archimandrite, early in the ninth century, which both drew upon previous material and then influenced later retellings. In a translation of the account by John Quinn and Roger Pearse, a man in Myra had become destitute. His bad fortune would soon lead to a life of ruin for his daughters: “He was willing to station them in a brothel so that he might thereby acquire the necessities of life for himself and his household.”

When Nicholas discovered the man’s dire situation, he remembered Proverbs 22:8: “God loves a person who is a cheerful giver.” Yet Nicholas did not want to cause the man and his family additional shame by giving him money in person. Instead, he “hurl[ed] a bag containing a large amount of gold into the house through the window at night.” He repeated his gift for the other two daughters. In a later telling by Methodios of Constantinople, Nicholas “was unwilling to have any observer of his own deed other than Christ.” Although Nicholas provides the man with financial assistance, his gifts are truly intended to bring the man back to grace and God; the gifts are vehicles, tangible objects of service to his fellow man.

Nicholas wanted to give these gifts unseen. His surreptitious offerings illuminate a challenge during the Christmas season. Gift-giving requires attention and engagement. The best gifts reveal the giver’s understanding of the recipient. However material, they are acts of love.

St. Nicholas’ most famous gifts were actions of grace: He recognized when members of his community were suffering, and he saved them. His gifts were monetary, but the actions were kenotic. Blessed are those who give without concern for return.

In seeking mercy for the condemned men, St. Nicholas fought for justice. When he gave money to the poor man and his daughters, he was helping those in need, while being attuned to their salvation.

Although contemporary American gift-giving during Christmas transcends belief — my friends and colleagues who are not Christian still celebrate the season — as followers of Christ, we should consider how the contemplation that precedes a gift is the most theologically rich component.

In the spirit of St. Nicholas, we might ask ourselves: If we could only get someone one gift for Christmas — a single gift that encapsulates not only our understanding of them, but also meets a spiritual need — what might that gift be? The process of meditating upon that gift could itself become a form of an examen, and an action of Christian imagination. The meditation upon that recipient, then, is a prayer.

For those overwhelmed at Christmas, such pensive shopping might sound exhausting. Yet that same exhaustion is part of our collective problem. Each year we are compelled to do more and spend more: an implicit or explicit competition of festivities. Whenever we spread ourselves thin, we risk subjugating or ignoring the spiritual center of the season.

About a decade ago, a friend shared a poem a day for Advent. Poetry is a great antidote for a stressful season; poems slow us down, and can bring us to an emotional state that feels much like prayer. One of my Advent favorites was “Lachrimae Amantis” by Geoffrey Hill. The poem is from his 1978 collection Tenebrae, and is actually the final section of a sequence about Good Friday. Yet the power and mystery of Christ’s life is how it is simultaneously seasonal and eternal; until he returns to us, we are forever in anticipation and preparation.

Hill begins with a question: “What is there in my heart that you should sue / so fiercely for its love?” The poetic question is prayerful, steeped in awe. He follows with another inquiry, in part: “What kind of care / brings you as though a stranger to my door.” Santa Claus is no stranger to children; he is visited at churches and malls and markets. Yet he is a symbol of temporary presence; of an arrival foretold but not fully understood. We might consider Christ in the same way; no matter how many times we have petitioned him in prayer, he often becomes a stranger to us. We need the month of Advent to prepare ourselves for this encounter.

The poem’s narrator considers how an angel “has fed such urgent comfort through a dream,” with the phrase, “your lord is coming, he is close.” Yet Hill complicates the anticipation and preparation with an enigmatic final stanza: “I have drowsed half-faithful for a time / bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse: / ‘tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.’” With a mind toward Advent, I read two meanings into that final line: On Christmas morning, we wake to welcome the Christ child, yet perhaps, in waiting to awaken to him, we avoid living in his image.

Christmas is surprisingly intellectual at the same time that it is visceral. We remember much of our youth but not our earliest moments; our infancy is something that we can recall through images and stories but not experience. In contrast, a season like Lent is easier to grasp theologically. In the weeks leading to Easter, we have Christ fully formed; we live and suffer with him during the Passion, and then we are promised the gift of eternal life with him. Although preparing for the birth of a child requires so much planning and sacrifice, it is challenging to think of the Christ child needing us. In all his glory, what could we, mere sinners, offer him?

Christ takes care of us, but we should consider our attention toward him. We prepare for Christ’s arrival by first acknowledging his central importance to the season. We extend that preparation through prayer and good deed, through love and service. We complete that preparation in our willingness to be open to his arrival on Christmas morning. When the family converges on the Christmas tree — children sifting through gifts, parents clumping wrapping paper and begging everyone to slow down — we have the perfect opportunity to affirm the blessed nature of our convergence. Some of the most potent prayers in our life require only a beat; a breath of recognition that we are in the presence of grace.

The earliest celebrations of St. Nicholas in America were marked by joy and festivity, and they should continue to be; in a world so steeped in suffering, an opportunity to share love and appreciation is a blessing. We should imagine St. Nick as less one who delivers bounty and instead as one who enables grace by focusing our attention.

The December 1913 issue of St. Nicholas magazine included a calendar for the following year, which included “red letter days” — when the magazine would arrive for subscribers. In the center of the calendar, Santa Claus is holding an issue of the magazine, and looking at himself in a cover mirror. A rhyme below him reads: “I don’t object to ‘Santa Claus,’ / ‘Kris Kringle,’ and the rest, / But, looking into it, I find / St. Nicholas suits me best!”

Perhaps, as with many of life’s conundrums, the answer to our problem has been found but forgotten. I confess that I like counting down the days to Santa’s arrival. There’s a certain ritual to heading down into the basement and searching for boxes of decorations (and admitting that I will never, ever manage to find them easily). Wreaths on doors and rows of lights in town are a comforting reminder: We are getting ready for someone to arrive.

When I was young, my oldest brother, Mark, had a Christmas morning tradition: He saved one gift to open that night. It frustrated me. Why couldn’t he open all of his gifts with everyone else? That lone gift — usually a book, a scarf, or gloves — would sit, in secret, among all of the opened presents. We ate dinner, and sat together, and that gift remained unopened until the evening. Mark would sometimes wait until right before we went to bed: after our extended family had left, and the timer on the Christmas tree clicked and returned the room to darkness. His patience with that gift, though, was itself a gift to me: an extension of the day and its joy.

Let’s keep Santa Claus. Let’s remember the inspiring life and tradition of St. Nicholas. Most importantly, let’s consider how both of them can bring us closer to each other, and in doing so, bring us closer to Chris