The Spirit of St. Nick
You better watch out. You better not cry. You better not pout, I'm telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town."
Actually, he's already making his rounds around town these days, appearing for lap-sitting and photo ops everywhere from the mall to the gym to the golf course. Some may argue that those aren't the real Santa's (especially if they smell like beef and cheese), but then again, we would have to go back about 1,700 years if we were going to find the real St. Nick.
I grew up being suspicious of Santa from a very early age. For one, I heard about him coming down chimneys, and we didn't have one at my house. When we became parents, we decided not to do Santa with our own kids, but we tried to keep them from ruining the surprises of other families. I do remember hearing one of my children straightening out a neighbor kid, saying, "Santa was a real person, but he's dead now." Oops!
Indeed, the character now popular as Santa Claus was first a real person who lived in the fourth century in Turkey. You have to wonder how an ancient bishop from east Asia, who lived 1,700 years ago, could have morphed into a fat, Coca-Cola swigging American elf who defies the laws of physics in a reindeer-pulled flying sleigh, to visit all over the world in one night.
What we do know is that a real man named Saint Nicholas was born into a wealthy Christian family in the third century. His parents died in a plague, and having inherited the family fortune, he decided to live out the radical call of Christ and give it to the poor. So he became famous for his generosity to those in need and his love for children.
Bishop Nicholas was exiled and imprisoned during the persecutions under the Emperor Diocletian, and after his release, attended the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. It was there that the original "jolly old Saint Nick" famously lost his temper and slapped the heretic Arius in the face because he argued that Jesus was not fully God. After he died in AD 343, legends grew up about his generosity, and throughout the Middle Ages he became one of the most popular saints across Europe. They even began to celebrate a St. Nicholas Feast Day on December 6 each year.
Eventually, when the European settlers came to America, the legends of Nicholas came with them, and the Dutch in particular brought St. Nicholas Day customs to the the New World. In 1804 when the New York Historical Society was formed, St. Nicholas was deemed its patron saint of both society and city. In January 1809, Washington Irving joined the society and on St. Nicholas Day that same year, he published Knickerbocker’s History of New York, with humorous references to a jovial St. Nicholas.
Irving’s St. Nicholas was not an Eastern Orthodox bishop, but a mischievous Dutchman with a clay pipe. The author’s imagination places St. Nick in Dutch New Amsterdam, and for the first time he is seen dropping down chimneys to give gifts to kids. When the society held its first St. Nicholas celebration on Dec 6, 1810, an artist created an image of the saint filling stockings by the fireplace, and the idea caught on.
Eleven years later publisher William Gilley introduced Sante Claus, The Children’s Friend. Now the gift-giving saint arrived from the North in a sleigh with flying reindeer, and he arrived on Christmas Eve—not Dec. 6--which officially connected him to Christmas for the first time. And he came with a new idea: he now “had a list and was checking it twice,” and he was “gonna find out who’s naughty or nice.” Two years later--in 1823--the new St. Nicholas mythology was consolidated with the hugely popular poem written by Clement Moore, A Visit from St. Nicholas, now known as The Night Before Christmas.
Illustrators jumped on that image, producing realistic portrayals of the red-suited, white-bearded rotund one, and by the 1930's Norman Rockwell picked up the tradition in his covers for The Saturday Evening Post. In 1931, in a moment of marketing genius, Coca Cola ran an ad with Santa drinking a Coke, and thus began the commercialization of the secular Santa, used to sell anything and everything.
Now days, we know Santa from movies and songs and yard decorations, and the link to the real St. Nicholas seems to have been completely broken. But that doesn't mean we can't reconnect to the true spirit of St. Nick--a valiant defender of the faith, a tender-hearted lover of the poor and generous soul who, in his kindness to children, saw that the true message of Christ’s nativity was that unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom.
Obviously, in this season of Advent, our first focus should be on the coming of Jesus. He is, after all, "the reason for the season," and it was His birth that we celebrate. But to do that in a way that reflects the heart of one of His followers wouldn't be a bad holiday tradition to begin.
From our family to yours, Merry Christmas! I hope to see you Sunday as we celebrate Jesus together.
--Pastor Ken
