Santa Claus

When Santa arrives,

he does elf gymnastics with the children
– then everyone starts dancing around the Christmas tree
Santa also leads singing games before finally handing out presents or goody bags to everyone. When Santa has finished handing out presents to all the children, and all the other childlike souls, there is a chance to have your photo taken with a real Santa Claus.

The story of Santa Claus

A saint of antiquity – today’s Santa Claus
Children love the cosy Santa Claus, and they know him as a very jovial fellow who says “ho, ho, ho” and brings lots of Christmas presents.

He wears red clothes, big boots, a Santa hat and, true to tradition, an enormous, snow-white beard. But how did the whole Santa Claus thing begin, and who is our Santa Claus really?

The story of our Santa Claus begins all the way back in the 3rd century. On 15 March in the year 270 a baby boy was born in the town of Patara, in the Greek part of the Mediterranean region of Asia Minor, present-day Turkey.

Even in his young years Nicholas was a very religious boy, and it is said that he fasted on both Wednesdays and Fridays, as the church rules of the time prescribed.

Who were Santa’s mother and father?

Nicholas’s uncle, who funnily enough was also called Nicholas, was bishop of Patara.

The uncle later ordained young Nicholas as a priest. Later, when Nicholas had been appointed Bishop of Myra, today’s Demre in Turkey, he was reportedly summoned to and attended the later so famous Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

Others are not so sure that Nicholas attended the council, as his name does not appear in the historical sources from the meeting.

The council took place at the instigation of the Roman emperor himself, Constantine the Great, and its purpose was to find solutions to a number of religious disputes that had arisen within the young Christian faith.

Can Santa do magic?

It is probably his reputation as a giver of gifts in particular that can be linked to the Santa Claus of our day.

Bishop Nicholas was known in his time as a generous man who would put coins in shoes that people had left outside. This can be linked directly to today’s hanging of stockings, which the sweet and kind Santa fills with treats.

One miracle story attributed to Nicholas took place when he was passing through a small island. The terrible thing had happened that a butcher had lured three children into his house and killed them. He had then cut the boys into pieces and hidden the pieces in barrels, planning to sell them as ham. Nicholas, who had originally come to take care of the island’s hungry, discovered what the butcher had done and brought the boys back to life through prayer.

A completely different story, also attributed to Bishop Nicholas, was when he helped an unhappy and poor man who had three daughters. In those days it was common for a father to pay a dowry when his daughters were to be married, but he could not afford it, and he even had three daughters.
So he was at his wits’ end, for the story goes that if the girls could not be married, they would have to resort to prostitution to be able to survive.

Nicholas, generous as he was

chose to spare the poor father and his daughters this humiliation, and under cover of night he anonymously threw three bags of gold into the poor man’s house through an open window, one bag for each daughter.

It is not known when Saint Nicholas was canonised, but his status as a saint lives on to this day. Proof of how high a status Saint Nicholas also had in the Middle Ages came when the unthinkable happened and the Saracens for a time took over Myra and the area where the Catholic saint was buried.

Several Italian city states found that it would be highly profitable if they could obtain the bones of the holy Saint Nicholas, so it really became a competition to get hold of the holy man’s earthly remains.

and Pope Urban II himself was present when the holy bones were enshrined and found their new resting place.

For this reason he is also known as Nicholas of Bari.
The city state of Venice, however, would not admit that the battle for Saint Nicholas’s bones was lost, and during the First Crusade sailors from Venice collected a further number of bones from the tomb in Myra.
These bones were brought to Venice, where yet another church was built in honour of Saint Nicholas.

In modern times, studies have shown that the bones in the tombs in Bari and Venice come from the same skeleton.
This Catholic saint, with his highly fascinating history and origin, is now one of the most recognisable figures of our time. The sweet, kind and generous Santa Claus whom we all remember fondly.