The legends surrounding jolly outdated St. Nicholas go method past delivering sweet and toys to youngsters.
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NEW YORK — The white-bearded Christian saint whose acts of generosity impressed America’s secular Santa Claus determine is understood worldwide — however Saint Nicholas’s origin story just isn’t.
The legends surrounding jolly outdated St. Nicholas — celebrated yearly on Dec. 6 — go method past delivering sweet and toys to youngsters.
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WHO WAS ST. NICHOLAS?
St. Nicholas was a fourth-century Christian bishop from the Mediterranean port metropolis of Myra (in modern-day Turkey).
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“A lot of the remainder is legend. There’s probably not a number of exhausting historic proof about St. Nicholas,” mentioned the Rev. Nicholas Ayo, writer of Saint Nicholas in America: Christmas Holy Day and Vacation.
However whether or not the tales are true just isn’t a lot the purpose, mentioned Ayo, an 89-year-old retired Notre Dame College professor named after St. Nicholas.
“There’s no Santa Claus that lands on the roof, however there’s a want in individuals’s coronary heart for an unconditional love that doesn’t rely in your habits, however the truth that you’re any person’s baby.”
Devotion to St. Nicholas — additionally known as St. Nick — unfold in the course of the Center Ages throughout Europe and he grew to become a favourite topic for medieval artists and liturgical performs, based on the Encyclopedia Britannica. He’s the patron saint of Greece and Russia, Moscow and New York, in addition to charities, youngsters and pawnbrokers.
He is also the patron saint of sailors. In 1807, Italian sailors took the stays of St. Nicholas from Myra to the seaport of Bari, on the southeast coast of the boot of Italy. They constructed a church in his honor; relics believed to be his are stored within the Bari’s eleventh century basilica of San Nicola.
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WHEN IS ST. NICHOLAS DAY CELEBRATED?
St. Nicholas Day is widely known yearly on Dec. 6, sometimes by filling the stockings and footwear youngsters miss in a single day with sweets and toys. It is also a becoming date for the patron saint of sailors.
“The December feast day of Saint Nicholas coincides with the start of the winter storm season on the Mediterranean,” Ayo writes.
WHAT ARE THE LEGENDS OF ST. NICK?
Legends surrounding St. Nicholas’ generosity seem in texts starting from medieval manuscripts to modern-day poems, together with how he interceded on behalf of wrongly condemned prisoners and miraculously saved sailors from storms.
One of the vital well-known legends, Ayo mentioned, options the getting old father of three younger girls who didn’t have means to pay for his or her dowry. St. Nicholas is claimed to have thrown gold items into the person’s window.
“It’s the quintessential Nicholas,” Ayo writes. “It requires no miracle, no credulity from the hearer, and no superstition at any stage. What is required is simply a beneficiant coronary heart prepared to present of his wealth in a self-effacing method that others could come to know a deep love of their life.”
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HOW DID ST. NICK INSPIRE AMERICA’S SANTA CLAUS FIGURE?
Devotion to St. Nicholas appears to have light after the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation, besides within the Netherlands the place his legend remained as Sinterklaas. Within the seventeenth century, Dutch Protestants who settled in New York introduced the Sinterklaas custom with them.
“The Dutch had St. Nicholas on the bow of the primary ship that went into New York harbor,” Ayo mentioned. Ultimately, St. Nicholas morphed into the secular Santa Claus.
Artist Thomas Nast, an engraver in Morristown, New Jersey, who illustrated the entrance cowl of Harper’s journal for a few years, performed a key position within the transformation, Ayo mentioned.
“He adopted the outline of Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas _ and Clement Clarke Moore’s ‘Twas the Night time earlier than Christmas’ poem,” Ayo says. “So, that’s how that received modified. However in Europe, the bishop exhibits up in bishop’s clothes on the door typically.”
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