Who was the real Santa Claus?
Saint Nicholas of Myra led an extraordinary life, but the modern celebration of Christmas misses the most critical aspect of it.
The figure of a kindly man of wizened years, clad in red and cosied by a snowy white beard, has become so powerful in the popular consciousness that ‘Santa Claus’ has rivaled, if not eclipsed, Christ himself in the imagery of Christmas.
Yet this seemingly mythical creation is firmly rooted in a man of flesh and blood, a man “appearing to us as the brightest dawn of piety and the epitome of the wondrous stars”, according to his first true biographer. So who was the real Saint Nicholas of Myra and Bari, and how did he earn the veneration of Christendom?
Plague in Asia

It was one day in the latter years of the 3rd century AD that a boy was born in the Lycian city of Patara, on the Aegean coast of Asia minor. His parents, noble by rank and by spirit, gave to him a name that would prove to be well chosen. For ‘Nicholas’, being a compound of the Greek words νίκη and λᾱός, may be translated literally as ‘Victory of the People’.
It was said that the birth of the saint took its toll on the body of his mother, who despite her joy at his birth was thereafter rendered infertile by it. Yet though sterile in flesh, she became fertile in spirit, and the time she spent with the boy instilled in him the virtues of holiness. Alas that such time would be limited — for a cruel epidemic would soon carry away the parents of Nicholas. He was left with great wealth, but more importantly, with honourable teachings.
With manhood now thrust prematurely upon him, Nicholas at once demonstrated the seriousness of his conviction. Remembering Psalm 62, "Should your riches increase, surrender not your heart to them”, he relinquished his grand inheritance to the needy of Lycia, such that as his coffers on Earth were drained, through goodness his treasury in Heaven overflowed.
The Charity of Saint Nicholas
Among the most dramatic of such donations concerned the incident that would cement the holy name of Nicholas. For it was around this time that a high born man who had, “owing to the plotting and envy of Satan”, as Michael the Archimandrite put it, fallen upon the hardest of times.
Acute was his desperation, for the broken man was father to three beautiful daughters of marriageable age. Yet with no means to provide for their dowries, he was unable to fulfil his duty as their father, and thus none would accept them as wives. Overcome with sorrow, he turned from the path of Grace and prepared to resign his daughters to the terrible fate of a woman with no other prospects — the brothel. Into such a chasm of darkness they would surely have fallen, were it not for Nicholas, who became aware of their plight.
Desiring to help, Nicholas approached the house of the unfortunate family under the cover of night, so as to ensure his deed would be unobserved. Through the window he hurled a purse laden with gold, before withdrawing into the night.
When morning broke, the father, finding this anonymous gift, wept tears of joy and gratitude to God. For the gold within the thrown pouch was sufficient to cover the dowry of his first daughter, whose marriage he swiftly arranged.
Following the conclusion of the marriage rites, Nicholas, seeing the salvation his noble deed had yielded, paid the house a second nocturnal visit. There he hurled through the window a second purse, equal in weight to the first. Come dawn, the father, disbelieving of the doubling of this charity, declared in prayer “Show me, O merciful Master, your angel among men”. Driven to irresistible curiosity, after the arrangement of his second daughter’s marriage, the father made sure to stay awake late into the night, anticipating the arrival of a third purse.
Arrive, of course, it did. This time however, the moment the purse landed within, the man rushed to the door and into the street, where upon recognising Nicholas, he threw himself at the Saint’s feet with the following words:
"If our common Master, Christ, hadn't stirred your goodness, we would have long ago destroyed our own lives by a shameful and destructive livelihood. But as it is, the Lord has saved us through you, most blessed one, and rescued us from the filth of immorality. And so we ought, like a debt, to give thanks to you all of our days, because you stretched out a hand of help to us and caused the poor to rise from the ground and raised the destitute up from a dunghill through your generous and truly wonderful gift"
Yet Nicholas, knowing that the public giving of gifts glorifies the donor and humbles the receiver, bound the man by oath never to make such blessings or share with others what had happened. With that, the two men departed in serenity.
Nicholas Enthroned
The time soon came when the Bishop of the city of Myra departed this life, thus beginning the hunt for a man to take his place who was worthy of God and the holiness of such station.
Among the clergy who gathered to debate this candidacy, there was one who sought the answer through prayer. It was said that the voice of Heaven spoke to him with the command, "Go to the house of God at night and stand at the entrance, and whoever comes to enter the church quietly before anyone else, take this man and appoint him to the office of bishop. His name is Nicholas”.
Armed with the approval of the other bishops, to the church he thus ventured, anxious to see whether the words were indeed divine. It was then that the first light of dawn revealed the lone figure of our Nicholas, seeking to enter the holy place. "How are you called, child?", the bishop asked. "Nicholas, a sinner, a servant of your Holiness, O master", he replied, with a humility that immediately endeared him to the bishop, who bade Nicholas come with him at once.
With the gathered men of cloth awed at the holiness of this man, Nicholas was presented to the people of Myra, who amid popular jubilation, had him mount the vacant bishop’s throne. ‘Victory of the People’ indeed, for Nicholas would be the most eminent of the Bishops of Myra, yet so too her most humble.
The Miracles of Saint Nicholas

Bishop Nicholas resolved without delay to fulfill the charge of his office and the mission of Christ. Sensing the power of dark forces that led his flock to sin, he turned righteous wrath upon the idols of the pagan gods, and the whispering spirits heard to lurk within.
In felling the temples of old and overturning their statues, a shadow was lifted from Lycia, and when Nicholas then overthrew the great Temple of Artemis, huntress of the night, an exile of demons from its ruin was observed who were thereafter chased away by God. With the darkest of supernatural temptations expunged, Nicholas turned next to the evils of Men.
Before long, word spread that Eustathius, the Roman governor of Lycia, was about to pass the ultimate penalty upon three men. But the sentence stemmed from evil bribery, not justice, and the imminence of their doom sped the arrival of Nicholas.
Spying the three on their knees, heads concealed by linen, the Bishop at once seized the executioner’s sword and cast it to the ground. Freeing the condemned, he rounded upon Eustathius and the corrupt juror. With fearsome words he lashed them, by one account threatening to inform the Emperor, by another to torment them through dreams with “utter horrors”. The men, shamed and ashamed, relented, and the three innocents were released.
Far and wide, the charity of Bishop Nicholas would be outstripped in fame by his ‘wonderwork’, or miracles in salvation of those who had fallen afoul of cruel men or Nature herself.
When famine blighted the Eastern Empire, hunger too would drive Men to horror and sin. One grisly episode that has been recounted with many variations, and proved popular in the French tradition, tells of three young boys who lost their way. Tired and hungry, they knocked upon the door of a butcher, asking for food and lodging. Alas the man served not God, but Satan. Taking his knife, he cut them down and cast their dismembered bodies into a salting tub.
Yet Nicholas, by chance or Providence, happened to take the same road, and knock upon the same door. At once aware of the unholy aura of the place, he commanded the butcher repent, and turning to the tub he proclaimed “Rise up, children”. Upon this command, channelled from Heaven, the mangled bodies reformed, and the children, whole again, were restored to life and to their families. Ever after would Saint Nicholas be patron and protector of children.
As the famine advanced, a ship docked in Lycia from Alexandria, bearing grain to Constantinople. Nicholas, descending to the port of Andriake, ordered the ship captains to unload a little so that his people would not starve.
His request however was dismissed on account of the grain being property of the state, and the issue being out of their hands. Undeterred, Nicholas reasoned with them — “From each ship remove a hundred measures from your cargo, and I will ensure your indemnity to the treasury official of Constantinople”. The captains agreed, handed over the grain, and left as soon as the wind permitted.
Yet upon their arrival in the eastern capital, they were astonished to find their cargo as full as it had been in Alexandria. In Lycia meanwhile, the grain would prove so bountiful that it saw the populace through two years and out of the famine, as all gave thanks to God.
From Anatolia to Italy
By his elder years, the Bishop of Myra was a revered man whose life had witnessed an extraordinary arc of fortunes for Christianity. For under the Emperor Diocletian and the last Great Persecution, Nicholas had endured dreadful incarceration. Yet with the upheaval of the Empire and ascension of Constantine, he was restored to such grace that in AD 325, he would attend the Council of Nicaea. There he spoke vociferously against the first great heresy — Arianism, which rejected the Trinity and held Christ to be separate from God.
Thus upon his death, on the 6th December one year towards the middle of the fourth century, admiration for his deeds and character would meet the fantasy of writers, commencing the veneration of Saint Nicholas in the West and especially the East, where his tomb in Myra would become a near essential stop for pilgrims in the Eastern Empire. Few were the sailors of Christendom who did not pray to Nicholas, whose legend as a protector of those in difficulty would see near every port from Italy to the Levant raise a church dedicated to him.
Indeed, when the advance of the Turks undid the earthly power of the Romans in the East, and the catastrophe of Manzikert in 1071 had left near all of Anatolia in Muslim hands, it was sailors who then came to the rescue of Nicholas.
Taking advantage of the chaos, compounded by the Great Schism which had left Eastern and Western Christianity divided, in 1087 a team of sixty two mariners from the Apulian city of Bari launched a raid on Myra, seizing the relics of Saint Nicholas which had there been laid to rest some seven centuries earlier.
On the 9th May, they returned to Bari in triumph, and the order was given at once to construct a worthy home for the bones of the Wonderworker. Two years later, the relics were translated to the crypt by the man who soon launch the First Crusade, Pope Urban II himself.
With the Norman crusaders indeed passing Bari, embarking in Apulia for the Holy Land, the fame of Saint Nicholas only grew in the West. While other cities would procure minor relics, to this day Bari remains the principal site of Nicholine pilgrimage, especially for the faithful of Russia, where Nicholas has been beloved among the saints for over a thousand years.
From Saint Nicholas to Sinterklaas
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to INVICTUS to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.