Presumably the Dutch don’t suffer Father Christmas trauma in the way that British children do – viz, discovering that he doesn’t exist. For the Dutch, he is St Nicholas, and he is the real deal. They have special biscuits for the feast of St Nicholas – spicy ones, with almonds – and he comes in the night to leave little presents in children’s shoes. For parents, this must be preferable to Christmas stockings, on the basis that you can only get a limited amount into a shoe.
But there isn’t much doubt that he and Father Christmas are one. In Clement Clarke Moore’s The Night Before Christmas of 1823, which gave us Santa as we now know him (the red coat came later), the narrator instantly recognised St Nick. And after the reindeers land on his roof, “Down the chimney St Nicholas came with a bound”.
Anyway, St Nicholas’s existence has come back into public view rather dramatically this month. Prof Tom Higham and Dr Georges Kazan, directors of the Oxford Relics Cluster at Keble College’s Advanced Studies Centre, have published a report of tests on one of his bones – from a relic originally from Lyons and now in the possession of a priest in Illinois. The radiocarbon results date the relic to the 4th century AD – the time that St Nicholas died (around 343 AD). So the bone could in principle be authentic.
Prof Higham said: “Many relics that we study turn out to date to a period somewhat later than the historic attestation would suggest. This bone fragment, in contrast, suggests that we could possibly be looking at remains from St Nicholas himself.”
Most of the bones of the saint are in the Basilica of St Nicholas in Bari, where they are buried in a crypt beneath a marble altar, with others preserved in the church of San Nicolò al Lido in Venice. They too will be subjected to the same process as the Lyons relic to determine their age. By dint of DNA analysis, we can discover a good deal about the age, gender and height of the individual concerned. Through technology those dry bones live.
I visited the Bari shrine years ago. The marble altar is surmounted by St Nicholas’s silver bust. There’s not a trace of the Christmas spirit about it. He could be any bishop-saint. The Italians are missing a trick here. If they marketed their shrine as that of Father Christmas, it could rival Lapland.
The important thing about St Nicholas is that he’s the Christian element of the secular festivity which has taken over the feast of the Nativity. His feast, on December 6, is at the start of Advent, at the beginning of the Christmas season, so there was a natural congruity between his feast day and that of the birth of Christ, once its date was set in December. In the Middle Ages, the celebration of the feast included some of the elements associated with Twelfth Night, the feast of misrule: the election of boy bishops who held court for the day.
Nicholas himself was said to have been persecuted by the Emperor Diocletian and died in Myra in modern-day Turkey, from where his relics were carried off by a group of Italian sailors and transported to Bari in 1087. Jacobus de Voragine, in his 13th-century Golden Legend, maintained that Myra had fallen into the hands of the Turks and passing sailors from Bari rescued the bones and brought them back. The best known of the saint’s good deeds in the Golden Legend has an obvious association with Christmas:
… a man of noble origin, but very poor, was thinking of prostituting his three virgin daughters in order to make a living out of this vile transaction. When the saint learned of this, abhorring the crime, he wrapped a quantity of gold in a cloth, and, under cover of darkness, threw it through the window of the man’s house and withdrew unseen. Rising in the morning, the man found the gold, gave thanks to God, and celebrated the wedding of his eldest daughter.
Nicholas then did the same for the other two girls. So, three lots of gold: he was an obvious patron for pawnbrokers. (He’s a useful patron of sailors too.)
There’s something reassuring about devotion to St Nicholas at Christmas. He is the Santa Claus who is never unmasked, the real Father of Christmas. The discovery that his bones may be those of the saint himself grounds him in our world. He is the embodiment of the spirit of generosity that is invested in the season, however corrupted that impulse has become. Christ may be the real gift at Christmas but we mortals like smaller presents too. And if nice St Nicholas is associated with them, that’s all to the good.
Melanie McDonagh is comment editor of the London Evening Standard
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.