If we should wake on the sixth of December and find our stockings full of candy and toys we should think that the ruddy old fellow who comes down the chimney has lost his wits and arrived about three weeks too soon. But his arrival would seem exactly on time to children in other parts of the world. For the feast of Saint Nicholas is the sixth of December, and how he became the patron saint of the day of the Saint of saints, the Christ – Child, is a story.
It is the story of a story. And when we say that it is true we shall remember that truth lives in the region of dreams. We shall be true to a glorious legend and to the way that legend has come down to us. Truth here consists in knowing that Santa Claus does come down the chimney and fills our stockings. If we do not believe that truth, we are lost souls and beauty and poetry, the only real truth, means nothing.
Nicholas was an actual person. Though he is the most popular saint in the calendar, not excepting St. Christopher and St. Francis, we know little about the man to whom so many lovely deeds, human and miraculous, have been ascribed. He was bishop of Myra, in Lycia, Asia Minor, in the first part of the fourth century of the Christian era. Asia Minor is far away from reindeer and Santa Claus, but the world of faith and fable is small and ideas travel far if they have centuries of time for their journey round the world. And Asia Minor is the cradle of all Christian ideas.
From the day of his birth Nicholas revealed his piety and grace. He refused on fast-days to take the natural nourishment of a child. He was the youngest bishop in the history of the church. He was persecuted and imprisoned with many other Christians during the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian, and was released and honoured when Constantine the Great established the Christian Church as the official religion, or at least recognised the Christian Church as the official religion, or at least recognised and encouraged it. Under Constantine in 325, was held the first general Council of the Christians at Nicaea, where many important matters were decided. These matters belong to theology and are not in our picture, but Nicholas may have had a hand, as vigorous hand in them. One of the arguers who seemed to Nicholas, and to the later orthodox church, a dangerous heretic so roused th4 righteous ire of the saint that Nicholas smote him in the jaw. This is one of the first episodes in militant Christianity.
About two hundred years after his death Nicholas was a great figure in Christian Legend, and Justinian, the last powerful Roman emperor in the East, built a church in honour of St. Nicholas in Constantinople. But the bones of the saint were not allowed to rest in peace in his home town, Muyra, where he was properly buried. About seven hundred years after his death, in the eleventh century, what remained of the earthly Nicholas was dug up and moved to the city of Bari, in Italy. In its day it was one of many important seaports that dominated Mediterranean traffic. The merchants of Bari organised a predatory expedition to the burial place of Nicholas, stole the bones, reburied them in Bari and built a church which was long an objective for religious pilgrims and is still worth the travel of a lover of art and architecture. The city of Venice, not to be out done by a rival maritime town, also claims to enshrine the bones of the saint.
So the curious tourist may take his choice. The bones are dust, wherever they lie. The churches in Bari and many cities of Europe still stand; there are more than four hundred dedicated to Nicholas in England. More important, the spirit of the saint is alive throughout the Christian world.
Nicholas was not a bare-foot recluse vowed to poverty. His father was a wealthy merchant, and his riches, inherited or created by the magic wand which fairy-godfathers wield, enabled him to be a dispenser of good things of life, an earthly representative of the Supreme Giver of gifts.
The most famous episode in his long career of benevolence is his rescue of the three dowerless maidens. An impoverished nobleman had three daughters who he was about to send into a life of shame. Nicholas heard of the tragic situation and at night threw a purse of gold into the house. This furnished the dowry for the eldest daughter, and she was married.
After a little while, says the Golden Legend, which is the great medieval story of the saints, his holy hermit of God ‘threw in another mass of gold’ and that provided a dowry for the second daughter. ‘And after a few days Nicholas doubled the mass of gold and cast it into the house’. So the third daughter was endowed. The happy father, wishing to know his benefactor, ran after Nicholas and recognised him, but the holy man ‘required him not to tell nor discover this thing as long as he lived’.
Thus Nicholas became not only the generous giver but the special patron saint of maidenhood and was so known and celebrated throughout the Middle Ages. Danté speaks in three short lines, as if he assumed that everybody already knew the story, of the generosity of Nicholas to maidens, ‘to lead their youth to honour’. The Italian painters made much of this story. A fine pictorial representation of it is the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York City. It is one of those dramatic paintings in which the old artists told a really moving tale long before the days of the camera and the moving picture. Inside the house you see the three distressed daughters and the still more dejected and ragged father. Outside is Nicholas climbing up at the door in the act of throwing the purse through a little window.
The story takes what seems an almost humorous turn. Let us imagine three purses of ‘masses’ of gold. We recognise them, in conventional form, in the three gold balls over the pawnbroker’s shop. Thus the holy man of the early Christian Church presides symbolically over a business which throughout Europe during the Middle Ages was conducted largely though not exclusively by members of the older Jewish Church. Pawnbroking included all forms of banking and money-lending with personal movable property as security. At first glance it does not seem quite appropriate that the charitable benevolent saint should become associated with a business, long notorious for exaction and usury, which the Mosaic Law forbade and which the derivative Christian morality condemned. One of the earliest acts of Christ was the expulsion of money-lenders from the temple: he ‘overthrew the tables of the money changers’ and scourged forth others who bought and sold.
But it may well be that the bankers and brokers wished to give sanctity and dignity to their business and so adopted the generous Nicholas as their heavenly protector. Every profession, guild, trade or, more likely, there was not much deliberate choice, these assimilations of legend to fact simply happened, nobody knows just how. Nicholas was adopted not only by the more or less respectable brokers but by thieves and pirates. The sinner as well as the honest man had his heavenly benefactor. And it is no more strange in the history of mythology that Nicholas should have been invoked by thieves than that the Greek Roman God Mercury should have been the tutelary deity of robbers and tricksters.
Nicholas was the patron of all who went down to the sea in ships, whether bound on a predatory cruise or a military expedition or an errand of peaceful trade. The distinctions were not always clear in fact or theory. There are many stories of his having rescued sailors from shipwreck. It is written in the Roman Breviary, which is the ‘official account’, that ‘in his youth on a sea voyage he saved the ship from a fearful storm’. Greek and Russian sailors appeal to him for protection and carry in the cabin of ships an image of the saint with a perpetually burning lamp. It is in accordance with the spirit of Christianity and other religions that a drowning man needs help, no matter what the moral purpose of his voyage through life may have been up to the hour of disaster.
Nicholas, however, was a dispenser of justice, according to the ideas of justice that prevailed when the stories about him grew up and took shape. One curious story of his judgment as patron of money-lending and trade reveals the attitude of those who made the story; it shows the somewhat confused relations between Jew and Gentile, relations familiarised for us by the story of Shylock. The tale is told in the Golden Legend, translated by Caxton, the father of English printing and a tireless interpreter of foreign books into our English tongue. I change a little Caxton’s words, which are not quite modern in form and construction:
‘There was a man who had borrowed of a Jew a sum of money and swore upon the altar of St. Nicholas that he would pay it back, as soon as he could, and gave no other pledge, The man kept the money so long that the Jew demanded payment. And the man said that he had paid. Then the Jew summoned the debtor into court. The debtor brought a hollow staff to the Jew to hold. Then he swore that he had given the Jew more than he owed and asked the J4ew to give him back the staff. The Jew, not suspecting the trickery, gave the staff back to the debtor who took it and went away. Sleep overcame him and he lay down in the road. A cart ran over him and killed him and broke the staff so that the gold rolled out. When the Jew heard this he came and saw the fraud. Many people said to him that he should take the gold. But he refused saying that if the dead man were brought to life again by the power of St. Nicholas, he would take the money and become a Christian. So the dead man arose, and the Jew was Christened’.
Thus the ends of justice were served and everybody was happy.
The most important role of Nicholas to us at the present time is his patronage of schoolboys, for this brings him close to us as Santa Claus, the bearer of gifts and the special saint of childhood. He was himself the Boy Bishop. A famous story of him is that of his bringing to life three boys. On their way home, the tale runs, the boys stopped at a farmhouse. The farmer and his wife murdered them, cut their bodies in pieces and put them into casks used for pickling meat. St. Nicholas arrived, charged the murderers with their crime and caused the boys to rise from the casks fully restored. That is one reason, so far as there are many reason in fable, why schoolboys celebrated the feast of St. Nicholas on December sixth.
Intimately connected with the feast of Nicholas was the custom of electing a Boy Bishop for a limited number of days extending just over Christmas. To get something of the spirit of the ceremony and celebration we have only to think of a modern game played in New York and other American cities in which a boy is elected mayor for a day with a full staff of subordinate juvenile officials. The motive of the modern custom is to teach youths civic virtue, public service and patriotism. The motive underlying the Boy Bishop was partly religious, partly childish love of pranks and parody, and partly a sort of democratic rebellion, tolerated for a short period each year against constituted authority.
The Boy Bishop was dressed in handsome robes like a real bishop, and he and his companions led a mock solemn parade and in some cities actually took possession of the churches. There was much feasting, the way to a boys heart being through his stomach as well as through gaudy garments; and there was on the part of elder participants a good deal of drinking. On the whole it was a charming and innocent affair. The boys took it seriously enough, especially the supper which concluded the performance. As early as the first part of the tenth century Conrad I, King of Germany, described a visit to a monastery when the revels were at their height. He was amused especially by the procession of the children, so grave and sedate that even Conrad ordered his followers to throw apples down the aisle, the Children did not lose their gravity.
But these high jinks too near to sacred things met with opposition and censure. Ecclesiastical and civil authority shut down on the Boy Bishops and parades and ceremonies in one country after another. Grown people are not always profoundly wise about either the fooling or the intense seriousness of children. The Roman Catholic Church in the middle of the fifteenth century tried to suppress by edict the Boy Bishop and all the customs relating to him. In England, where this childish festival prevailed not only in the cathedral cities but in the small towns, the Protestant Reformation applied a depressing hand, and Queen Elizabeth, whose own court was gay with revelries, masques, interludes, finally abolished the Boy Bishop.
Childhood, however, has its revenges upon the interfering adult. With the aid of the conniving adult who refuses to grow up, Nicholas remained the saint of children. In some countries his festival was taken over, assimilated to Christmas, partly because St. Nicholas Day is so near to Christmas and partly because in some parts of the world there arose a sort of Protestant hostility to the worship of saints. But custom and amusement prevail even when religion and history are forgotten and ignored. To cite another example as familiar as Christmas, on the evening of the last day of October children bob apples, make pumpkin jack-o’-lantern, and play all kinds of tricks to pester innocent neighbours. They call the occasion Halloween, but few of them or their neighbours know that "hallow" means saint, and that the first of November is All Saints’ Day.
So it is with Nicholas. He is honoured and accepted with a kind of childish ignorance. Professor George H. McKnight of Ohio State University, who has given us the best account in English of the good St. Nicholas, begins his book by saying that strangely little is known of him in America. But he belongs to us by a very special inheritance. Our Dutch ancestors in New York – ancestry is a matter of tradition, not of blood – brought St. Nicholas over to New Amsterdam. The English colonists borrowed him from their Dutch neighbours. The Dutch form is San Nicolaas. If we say that rather fast with a stress on the broad double – A of the last syllable, a D or a T slips in after the N and we get ‘Sandyclaus’ or ‘Santa Claus’. And our American children are probably the only ones in the world who say it just that way; indeed the learned, and very British, Encyclopedia Britannica calls our familiar form ‘an American corruption’ of the Dutch. I suspect, however, that we should hear something very like it from the lips of children in Holland and Germany; in parts of southern Germany the word in sound, and I think spelling, is ‘santiklos’.
However, that may be, America owes the cheery saint of Christmas to Holland and Germany. In Belgium and Holland the festival of the saint is still observed on his birthday, December sixth, and the jollities and excitements are much the same as those we enjoy at Christmas, with some charming local variations. Saint Nicholas is not the merry fellow with a chubby face and twinkling eye, but retains the gravity appropriate to a venerable bishop. He rides a horse or an ass instead of driving a team or reindeer. He leaves his gifts in stockings, shoes or baskets. And for children who have been very naughty, and whose parents cannot give him a good account of them, he leaves a rod by way of admonition, for he is a highly moral saint, though kind and forgiving. If the parents are too poor to buy gifts, the children say ruefully that the saint’s horse has glass legs and has fallen down and broken his foot. The horse or ass of St. Nicholas is not forgotten; the children leave a wisp of hay for him, and in the morning it is gone.
As with us, the older people have their own festivities, suppers, exchange of gifts, surprises. But also as with our Christmas; the feast of Nicholas is primarily a day for Children.
