6
December. Day of Remembrance:
1662 Book of Common Prayer: Bishop Nicolas of Myra & Attendee at
Council of Nicaea
Saint Nicholas, also
called Nicholas of Bari or Nicholas of Myra (flourished 4th
century, Myra, Lycia, Asia Minor [near modern
Kale (Demre), Turkey]; feast day December 6), one of the most popular
minor saints commemorated in the Eastern and Western churches and now
traditionally associated with the festival of Christmas. In many countries children
receive gifts on December 6, Saint Nicholas Day.
Nicholas’s
existence is not attested by any historical document, so nothing certain is
known of his life except that he was probably bishop of Myra in the 4th century. According to
tradition, he was born in the ancient Lycian seaport city of Patara,
and, when young, traveled to Palestine and Egypt. He became bishop of Myra soon
after returning to Lycia. He was imprisoned during the persecution of
Christians by the Roman emperor Diocletian but was released under the rule of
Emperor Constantine the Great and attended the first Council (325) of Nicaea.
He was buried in his church at Myra, and by the 6th century his shrine there
had become well-known. In 1087 Italian sailors or merchants stole his alleged
remains from Myra and took them to Bari, Italy; this removal greatly increased
the saint’s popularity in Europe, and Bari became one of the most
crowded of all pilgrimage centres. Nicholas’s relics remain enshrined in the
11th-century basilica of San Nicola at Bari.
Nicholas’s
reputation for generosity and kindness gave rise to legends of miracles he performed for the poor and
unhappy. He was reputed to have given marriage dowries of gold to three girls
whom poverty would otherwise have forced into lives of prostitution and to have
restored to life three children who had been chopped up by a butcher and put in
a tub of brine. In the Middle Ages, devotion to
Nicholas extended to all parts of Europe. He became the patron saint of Russia and Greece; of charitable
fraternities and guilds; of children, sailors, unmarried girls, merchants, and
pawnbrokers; and of such cities as Fribourg, in Switzerland, and
Moscow. Thousands of European churches were dedicated to him, one, built by the
Roman emperor Justinian I at Constantinople (now Istanbul), as early as the 6th
century. Nicholas’s miracles were a favourite subject for medieval artists and
liturgical plays, and his traditional feast day was the occasion for the
ceremonies of the Boy Bishop, a widespread European custom in
which a boy was elected bishop and reigned until Holy Innocents’ Day (December
28).
After the
Reformation, devotion to Nicholas disappeared in all the Protestant countries
of Europe except Holland, where his legend persisted as Sinterklaas (a Dutch
variant of the name Saint Nicholas). Dutch colonists took this
tradition with them to New Amsterdam (now New York City) in the American colonies in
the 17th century. Sinterklaas was adopted by the country’s English-speaking
majority under the name Santa Claus, and his legend of
a kindly old man was united with old Nordic folktales of a magician who
punished naughty children and rewarded good children with presents. The
resulting image of Santa Claus in the United
States crystallized in the 19th century, and he has ever since remained the
patron of the gift-giving festival of Christmas.
Under various
guises Saint Nicholas was transformed into a similar benevolent gift-giving
figure in the Netherlands, Belgium, and other northern
European countries. In the United Kingdom, Santa Claus is known as Father
Christmas.
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