St. Nicholas Day

On the night of 5 December, children across the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Austria leave a shoe by the fireplace or front door, sometimes with a carrot inside for a horse, and wake on the morning of the 6th to find it filled with chocolate coins, marzipan and small toys. The man they are thanking died on 6 December in the year 343, was bishop of a Greek-speaking town on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, and would be astonished to learn that, sixteen centuries later, a red-suited version of himself delivers presents to children on every continent. St Nicholas Day is where Santa Claus begins, and the bishop at its root is a far more vivid figure than the jolly cartoon he became.

The bishop of Myra

Nicholas was bishop of Myra, a port town in the Roman province of Lycia, in the first half of the fourth century. The reliable historical record is slim, but the tradition is consistent: he was born to prosperous Christian parents who died young, leaving him an inheritance he gave away rather than kept. His feast falls on 6 December because that is the date the early Church recorded as the day of his death, traditionally given as 343.

The defining legend is the one that turned him into a gift-giver. A poor man in Myra had three daughters and no money for their dowries, which in that society meant they could not marry and faced destitution or worse. Nicholas, the story goes, threw three bags of gold through the man’s window under cover of darkness on three successive nights, one for each daughter, refusing any credit. The detail that the gold sometimes landed in stockings or shoes left drying by the fire is exactly the seed from which the modern stocking and the shoe-by-the-door custom grew.

The slap at Nicaea and the bones at Bari

Two later episodes show how potent his memory became. According to a tradition that circulated widely in the medieval Church, Nicholas attended the Council of Nicaea in 325, the great gathering of bishops convened by Constantine to settle the Arian controversy over the divinity of Christ. The story claims that Nicholas was so enraged by the priest Arius’s arguments that he struck him across the face, was stripped of his episcopal office and briefly imprisoned for the outburst, then reinstated. Historians treat the episode with heavy scepticism, since the earliest sources for it appear centuries afterwards, but it captures the fierce, uncompromising Nicholas that the gentle Santa Claus has entirely erased.

The second episode is solidly documented. In 1087, sailors and merchants from the Italian port of Bari sailed to Myra, then falling under Seljuk Turkish control, and removed Nicholas’s relics, carrying his bones back to Bari, where they remain in the crypt of the Basilica di San Nicola, begun that same year to house them. This “translation” of the relics turned Bari into one of medieval Europe’s great pilgrimage destinations and dramatically boosted the saint’s cult across the Western Church; rival sailors from Venice are said to have gathered remaining fragments a few years later, which is why a smaller cache of relics is claimed there too. His bones reportedly exude a clear liquid, the “manna of St Nicholas,” which clergy still draw off and distribute each year, and modern forensic examination of the Bari skeleton has been used to reconstruct the face of a real man, broad-jawed and with a broken nose, lending the legend an oddly concrete anchor.

From Sinterklaas to Santa Claus

The journey from bishop to Father Christmas runs through the Netherlands. The Dutch venerated the saint as Sinterklaas, a tall, dignified bishop in red robes and mitre who arrives by steamboat each year to distribute gifts. Dutch settlers carried the figure to their colony of New Amsterdam, later New York, and over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the name Sinterklaas anglicised into “Santa Claus.” A decisive nudge came in 1821, when an American poem shifted the gift-giving from St Nicholas’s 6 December feast to Christmas Eve, fusing the saint with the festive season and beginning the transformation that Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 verses, later illustrators and twentieth-century advertising would complete.

Why the day matters

St Nicholas Day survives as a quieter, older counterpoint to the commercial juggernaut of Christmas, and that is much of its appeal. Falling early in Advent, it gives children a first burst of anticipation weeks before the main event, and it keeps the figure of the saint, the actual fourth-century bishop, present in cultures that might otherwise have lost him entirely to a soft-drink mascot. For families in central Europe the 6th is a genuine occasion with its own foods, songs and small rituals, distinct from and predating the gift-heavy Christmas morning that Anglophone countries treat as the climax. The day sits within the same midwinter constellation of Christian observances as Candlemas Day and the great feast of Christmas Eve, each marking a station in the older liturgical year.

How it is celebrated

In the Netherlands and Belgium, Sinterklaas arrives in mid-November and his feast on the evening of 5 December, Sinterklaasavond, is the main event, with families exchanging gifts, sweets such as pepernoten and speculaas, and humorous poems written to tease the recipient. In Germany and Austria, children clean their boots and set them out on the night of the 5th to be filled with nuts, oranges, chocolate and small presents. The saint does not always come alone: in Alpine regions he is shadowed by Krampus, a horned, chain-rattling demon of central European folklore dating back centuries, whose job is to frighten badly behaved children while Nicholas rewards the good. In the Rhineland and elsewhere the companion is Knecht Ruprecht, a sterner helper carrying a switch. The chocolate figure of the bishop, foil-wrapped with crook and mitre, is the day’s most recognisable treat.

Regional variations

The feast looks markedly different across Europe. In much of central and eastern Europe, including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, children leave out boots or hang stockings for “Mikuláš” or “Mikołaj.” In parts of Switzerland the saint, called Samichlaus, walks through villages accompanied by Schmutzli, a soot-faced helper. In Greece, where Nicholas is a hugely important saint as patron of sailors, the day is more strongly religious than gift-focused, and many Greek men named Nikolaos celebrate their name day. In Italy, the relics at Bari draw pilgrims, and the southern city of Bari holds a major festival each May marking the arrival of the bones rather than the December feast. France’s eastern regions, especially Lorraine, treat Saint Nicolas as a regional patron with parades and the famous pain d’épices gingerbread. The foods follow the geography: speculaas and pepernoten in the Low Countries, Lebkuchen and chocolate Nikolaus figures in Germany, and oranges, a nod to the gold of the dowry legend, almost everywhere.

A patron of sailors and children

Nicholas accumulated an extraordinary range of patronages. He is the patron of children, naturally, but also of sailors and merchants, who spread his cult along the Mediterranean trade routes and built chapels to him in port towns from Greece to the Baltic. He is patron of Russia, of Greece, of the city of Amsterdam, of pawnbrokers, whose three-ball sign is sometimes traced to his three bags of gold, and of repentant thieves. Few saints attached themselves to so many corners of ordinary working life, which is part of why his memory proved so durable across centuries and languages.

Fun facts

• The Santa Claus stocking descends directly from the three bags of gold Nicholas reportedly threw through a poor family’s window, some of which legend says fell into shoes or stockings drying by the fire.
• A long-standing tradition holds that Nicholas slapped the heretic Arius at the Council of Nicaea in 325, was jailed for it, and then reinstated, a far cry from the genial Santa he became.
• His bones were stolen from Myra by sailors from Bari in 1087, and the relics reportedly still produce a clear liquid called “manna” that is collected at his basilica each year.
• The pawnbroker’s traditional symbol of three golden balls is sometimes traced to the three bags of gold in the dowry legend, with Nicholas as patron of the trade.
• The leap from “Sinterklaas” to “Santa Claus” happened in colonial New York, and an 1821 American poem moved the gift-giving from 6 December to Christmas Eve, splitting the saint from his own feast day.

A closing reflection

It is worth pausing on what the centuries have done to Nicholas of Myra. The fierce bishop who gave away his fortune, defended his faith with his fists and was venerated by sailors has been sanded down into a beaming figure who exists mainly to dispense presents. Something is lost in that smoothing, but something also survives: every child who finds a shoe full of chocolate on 6 December is, without knowing it, repeating a gesture first made through a stranger’s window seventeen centuries ago, when an anonymous gift in the dark was meant to ask for nothing in return.