Saint Nicholas, the original and true Santa Claus

Read Hanne’s The Herland Report.

The Christmas celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ has been a religious tradition for more than 2,000 years. Yet, over the past decades the Christian holiday has been reinvented by Western secular forces to serve consumerism, indulgence and materialism alone. The deep, philosophical meaning of Christmas and God’s love for humankind is gone from our atheist mainstream culture, and we are shifting into nihilism, vanity and lovelessness.

Santa Claus has become this fat, humorous troll from the North Pole who puts gifts into children’s stockings, riding his sleigh on reindeer in the air like a witch, while occult figures such as gnomes and elves aid him in the pursuit of serving the interests of the retail market. It is all Walt Disney. The story of the true Santa is totally lost.

Church history explains well who the original Santa Claus was, namely an early Christian bishop in modern-day Turkey, Saint Nicholas (A.D. 270-343). He was a wealthy man and one of the greatest church fathers in Christian history, an example in humility, generosity, love for the suffering, fearlessly facing evil. He used his money to help the destitute, the poor, the orphaned, and courageously spoke up against political leaders when he found injustice and wrongdoing. Saint Nicholas’ work was marked by a desire not to achieve praise for his good deeds. He kept giving in secret, so that only God would see it. The aim was to mimic Christ in doing good to others and helping solve their problems. “The giver of every good and perfect gift has called upon us to mimic His giving,” he said.

One of the well-known stories about him is that of a formerly rich man who had lost everything and now was so poor that he was in the process of sending his young daughters into prostitution. Saint Nicholas heard about this and in secrecy threw stockings filled with gold coins into their house. The man was enabled to avoid the pitfalls of poverty and restore the honor of his daughters. Stories of how Nicholas helped prisoners, consoled those who were tortured, provided solutions for a variety of problems that his contemporaries faced – this all sums up the work of St. Nicholas as recorded in the early centuries after Christ.

The gentle Saint Nicholas is also described as an ardent warrior, zealously confronting political as well as religious leaders when he felt the truth was in jeopardy. His willingness to suffer in prison, lose his social status, be depraved of worldly honor in order to stand up for truth, made him exemplary. Saint Nicholas became the archbishop of Myra in Lycia, known for his love for the population. Under the excruciating persecutions against Christians under the reign of Emperor Diocletian (284-305), Nicholas was in prison for refusing to give up his faith in Christ. Then, when Emperor Constantine the Great (272-337) took power, Saint Nicholas was brought out from prison and returned to his esteemed work as archbishop. He later participated in the First Ecumenical Council in A.D. 325 and the very institutionalization of Christianity that would cause the Roman Empire to last another thousand years in Eastern Constantinople.

With the advent of Protestantism, Christians in Europe lost much of the knowledge about the early church fathers who lived in the centuries after Christ. Their stories were forgotten.

The modern twist to Santa Claus is only about 120 years old, and serves as a testament to how profoundly atheism has changed our culture. It is gnomes and occult trolls we focus on now, not the birth of Jesus Christ in a manger: The son of God, born in humility, destined to give those who submit to him existential peace and eternal life, born to enlighten our darkened hearts with love for one another.

“In the 19th century, decisive works cemented the modern reshaping of Saint Nicholas,” writes the author of “Kingdom of Vikings,” Simon Vincent, including “‘A Visit by Saint Nicholas’ by Clement C. Moore in 1823, and a widely distributed illustration of St. Claus by Thomas Nast in 1863. In England, ‘Father Christmas’ was trending as a literary personification of the festive Christmas spirit – most famously exemplified in Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol.’ References to the gift-giving Saint Nicholas were abbreviated to ‘St. Claus,’ from the Dutch Sinterklaas.”

In the 1930s, the Coca-Cola Company used Santa Claus to promote their brand, Walt Disney films emerged, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra sang about it, and the secular creation of Santa Claus was complete to the joy of financial capital markets. And just like that, the true Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, was lost.