St. Nicholas

St. Nicholas was a fourth-century bishop of Myra, a port city in Lycia on the southern coast of what is now Turkey. He is remembered for giving away his wealth in secret, above all in the story of the three bags of gold that saved a poor man's daughters, and his feast falls on 6 December. That reputation for hidden generosity travelled through Dutch and German custom into English-speaking countries and produced Santa Claus.

Nicholas is among the most venerated saints in the Christian world and among the least documented. No contemporary source records his life, and the earliest surviving biography was written centuries after his death. This page separates the few things that can be said with confidence from the large body of legend that grew around him, because in his case the difference is the interesting part.

1. The Bishop of Myra

Nicholas was the Bishop of Myra. He famously saved three poor girls from slavery by secretly tossing bags of gold through their window at night. This is the origin of Santa Claus. He was the original secret Santa.

Myra was a working port on the Lycian coast, a stop on the grain route between Egypt and Constantinople. Acts 27:5 to 6 records St. Paul's prison ship changing vessels at Myra on the way to Rome, which gives an idea of the traffic. A bishop there would have dealt with sailors, merchants, grain shipments, famine and the imperial administration, and every one of those turns up in the stories told about Nicholas.

The dates usually given are a birth at Patara in Lycia in the second half of the third century and a death on 6 December, with the year most often stated as 343. Those dates come from later tradition rather than from any record made at the time. Tradition also holds that he suffered imprisonment during the persecution under Diocletian and was released when Constantine granted toleration, which would place his episcopate across the most decisive change in the Church's legal position in its history.

2. The Puncher of Heretics

He was present at the Council of Nicaea. Legend says that when the heretic Arius denied the divinity of Jesus, Nicholas got so angry he walked across the room and punched Arius in the face. He got in trouble, but he proved that sometimes you have to fight for the truth (though we recommend using words, not fists).

The word legend in that paragraph is carrying real weight, and the honest account is more interesting than the story. No early source places Nicholas at Nicaea. His name appears in some surviving lists of the bishops who attended the council in 325 and is absent from others, and those lists were compiled later and vary considerably, so his presence is possible and unproven. The account of him striking Arius appears only in the late medieval period, roughly a thousand years after the council, and no writer before then mentions it. It is a story the Middle Ages told about a saint they already loved as a defender of orthodoxy.

What is worth knowing is the argument itself. Arius, a priest of Alexandria, taught that the Son was the first and highest of God's creatures, made before time but made, so that there was a time when the Son was not. The council answered that the Son is begotten and not made, of one substance with the Father, and the word it used, homoousios, is still said in the Creed at every Sunday Mass. Our page on the doctrine of the Trinity works through what was settled at Nicaea, and our page on St. Athanasius follows the bishop who carried the fight for the next fifty years.

The moral usually drawn from the punching story is that truth is worth fighting for. That is correct, and the way the fight was actually won is instructive: decades of argument, exile, patience and precise language, carried out by bishops who kept working after they lost.

3. Defender of Children

He is the patron saint of children, sailors, and innocent victims. His life reminds us that true giving points to the greatest gift of all: the Incarnation of Christ.

Each of those patronages has a traceable source. Sailors invoked him because of stories, told from early on, of Nicholas calming a storm at sea and appearing to a ship's crew in danger, which is why port cities from Greece to the Netherlands to Russia are full of churches under his name. The falsely accused invoked him because of the account, among the oldest Nicholas material to survive, in which he stops an execution in Myra by seizing the sword from the executioner's hands, and afterwards intervenes for three imperial officers condemned on false charges.

The patronage of children rests on a different footing. A medieval legend, which appears in the West and not in the earlier eastern material, tells of an innkeeper who murdered three boys and hid them in a barrel of brine, and of Nicholas raising them. The three children in a tub who appear at the saint's feet in Western art come from that story. It is late, it has no early attestation, and there is no reason to repeat it as history. The older ground for the patronage is the dowry story, in which what Nicholas actually rescued was three young women from being sold.

4. What the Sources Actually Say

Setting out the state of the evidence takes one paragraph, and it explains the shape of everything else on this page.

Nobody who knew Nicholas wrote about him, or if they did, nothing has survived. He is not mentioned by the great fourth-century writers whose works we have. The oldest surviving narrative about him is the account of his intervention for three condemned officers, which scholars date some generations after his lifetime, and the earliest full biography was composed by Michael the Archimandrite around the ninth century. The Latin West received his story later still, and the great medieval collections of saints' lives then added to it freely.

Two conclusions follow, and Catholics lose nothing by stating both. First, the details of Nicholas's biography cannot be recovered. Second, the veneration is old, wide and independent of those details. Churches were dedicated to him in Constantinople within a few centuries of his death, and the eastern churches call him Nicholas the Wonderworker and commemorate him weekly. A cult that large, spread that early, across languages and empires, is itself evidence that a bishop of Myra made an impression his own city never forgot. What he did to make it is beyond recovery.

The Church's judgment that a person is a saint is a judgment about their standing with God, and it does not certify the biography that grew up around them. Our page on the saints and how the Church recognises them explains the distinction.

5. The Three Bags of Gold and Secret Giving

The dowry story is the oldest thing anyone tells about Nicholas and the one that shaped everything after it.

A man of Myra had lost his money and had three daughters. Without dowries they could not marry, and the account is explicit that he was preparing to sell them into prostitution to survive. On three separate nights Nicholas threw a bag of gold in through the window, one for each daughter, and left without being seen. In the version most often told, the father lay in wait on the third night and caught him, and Nicholas made him promise to tell no one.

Three details in that story explain three later customs. The gold given in secret became the tradition of anonymous gifts on his feast. The three purses became three gold balls in art, and the three gold balls became the pawnbroker's sign across Europe, since Nicholas is the patron of moneylenders who lend honestly. And the gold thrown through a window at night, in some tellings landing in stockings left to dry by the fire, is the direct ancestor of the stocking hung at Christmas.

The Gospel behind it is explicit. Jesus tells his disciples that when they give alms they should not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing, so that the giving is in secret, and the Father who sees in secret will reward them (Matthew 6:2 to 4). Nicholas is the saint who is famous for doing something he tried to keep hidden, and the irony is the point of the feast.

6. From Myra to Bari: The Relics and the Manna

The best-documented episode in the Nicholas story happened seven centuries after he died.

In 1087, sailors and merchants from Bari in southern Italy took the relics of St. Nicholas from his tomb at Myra and carried them home. Myra was then under pressure from Turkish advance, and Venetian and Barese interests were both pursuing the relics. Bari got there first. The Basilica di San Nicola was built to house them and the crypt was consecrated within a few years. Further relics were brought to Venice during the First Crusade, and the two cities have disputed the division ever since.

The feast of the translation is kept on 9 May and remains one of the largest festivals in Bari, drawing Orthodox as well as Catholic pilgrims, since Nicholas is venerated by both. A clear liquid collects in the tomb and is drawn off each year on that date; it is known as the manna of St. Nicholas and is distributed to pilgrims. The tomb was opened during restoration work in the twentieth century and the bones were examined and measured by an anatomist, which is the basis of the facial reconstructions that circulate today.

Nicholas is one of the very few saints venerated with equal enthusiasm by Catholics, Orthodox and Anglicans, and Bari has become a meeting point between Rome and the Orthodox churches for that reason. Our page on the Eastern Orthodox Church covers that relationship.

7. How St. Nicholas Became Santa Claus

The line from the bishop of Myra to the figure in the red suit is traceable and short.

In the Low Countries and in German-speaking Europe, children left shoes out on the eve of 6 December and found small gifts in the morning, given in the name of the bishop, who was called Sinterklaas in Dutch. Dutch settlers brought the custom to North America. In the early nineteenth century, American writers reworked it: Washington Irving's satirical history of New York in 1809 gave the figure a pipe and a wagon, and the poem beginning "'Twas the night before Christmas", published anonymously in 1823 and generally attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, supplied the sleigh, the reindeer, the chimney and the stocking, and moved the visit to Christmas Eve. The cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the figure repeatedly for Harper's Weekly from the 1860s and settled the appearance. Twentieth-century advertising standardised the red.

Catholics sometimes ask whether Santa Claus is a problem. The plain answer is that the modern figure is a folk descendant of a real bishop, and the useful response is to reconnect the two rather than to argue about the costume. Tell children who Nicholas was, keep 6 December as his day with a small gift in a shoe, and let the giving on Christmas point where Nicholas pointed it, at the birth of Christ. The saint's own habit of hiding his generosity is a better model for a parent than a lecture.

8. Feast Day and How Families Keep It

The feast of St. Nicholas falls on 6 December, in the first days of Advent. In the Roman calendar it is an optional memorial, and in the eastern churches it is a major feast. Bari keeps 9 May for the translation of the relics.

The customs are simple and cost almost nothing.

• Shoes by the door. Children leave a shoe out on the evening of 5 December and find coins wrapped in gold foil, an orange, or a small sweet in the morning. The gold recalls the three purses.
• A gift given anonymously. Adults can keep the feast by giving something to someone who will not know where it came from, which is the actual content of the story.
• Chocolate coins and speculaas. The Dutch and Belgian baking traditions for the day are worth stealing.
• Reading the story. Tell the dowry story to children before the gifts, so that the day has a reason attached to it.

Where 6 December is kept properly, Christmas Day itself is less frantic, because the gift-giving has already had a saint attached to it and a first outing.

9. What a Reader Can Take From St. Nicholas

Give where it cannot be traced back to you. The one act everyone remembers about Nicholas is the one he tried to hide. Matthew 6:3 is the instruction, and an anonymous gift this month is the way to obey it.

Look at what the money is preventing. The dowry story is about three women who were about to be sold. Nicholas found the one household and paid the exact amount it needed. Most people know of a situation like that within a mile of where they live.

Defend the truth without theatre. The Arian crisis was won by patient argument over decades. Whatever Nicholas did or did not do at Nicaea, the punch is the least useful part of the story.

Be willing not to be known. Almost nothing survives about who Nicholas actually was. What survives is what he did for people who could not repay him, and that turned out to be enough to carry his name to every continent.

10. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Nicholas?

St. Nicholas was a bishop of Myra, a port city in Lycia in what is now southern Turkey, during the fourth century. He is remembered above all for giving away his wealth in secret, in particular for the three bags of gold he is said to have thrown through a poor man's window to provide dowries for his three daughters. His feast day is 6 December, and the Dutch and German customs attached to it produced the modern figure of Santa Claus.

Did St. Nicholas punch Arius at the Council of Nicaea?

There is no early evidence that he did. The story of Nicholas striking Arius appears only in the late medieval period, roughly a thousand years after the Council of Nicaea in 325, and no earlier writer mentions it. Even the attendance of Nicholas at the council is uncertain, because his name appears in some surviving lists of the bishops present and is absent from others, and those lists were compiled later and disagree with one another.

Is St. Nicholas the same as Santa Claus?

Santa Claus is a folk descendant of St. Nicholas. In the Low Countries children left shoes out on the eve of his feast on 6 December and received small gifts in the name of the bishop, called Sinterklaas in Dutch, and Dutch settlers brought the custom to North America. American writers and illustrators in the nineteenth century moved the visit to Christmas Eve and added the sleigh, the reindeer and the chimney, and later advertising fixed the red suit.

When is the feast day of St. Nicholas?

The feast of St. Nicholas is 6 December, which falls in the first days of Advent. It is an optional memorial in the Roman calendar and a major feast in the eastern churches. The city of Bari also keeps 9 May, the anniversary of the arrival of his relics from Myra in 1087.

Where are the relics of St. Nicholas?

The relics of St. Nicholas were taken from his tomb at Myra by sailors and merchants from Bari in southern Italy in 1087 and are kept in the crypt of the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari. Further relics were brought to Venice during the First Crusade. A clear liquid known as the manna of St. Nicholas collects in the tomb at Bari and is drawn off each year on 9 May and distributed to pilgrims.

How much do we actually know about St. Nicholas?

Very little can be established. No contemporary source records his life, the great fourth-century Christian writers do not mention him, and the earliest full biography was written around the ninth century, several hundred years after his death. What is certain is that his veneration was early, very wide and independent of any single account, since churches were dedicated to him across the Christian East within a few centuries and he is honoured by Catholics, Orthodox and Anglicans alike.

What is St. Nicholas the patron saint of?

St. Nicholas is the patron saint of children, of sailors and mariners, of merchants and pawnbrokers, and of people falsely accused, and he is patron of Russia, Greece, and the cities of Bari and Amsterdam among others. The patronage of sailors comes from early stories of him calming a storm at sea, the patronage of the falsely accused from an account of him stopping an execution at Myra, and the three gold balls that became the pawnbroker's sign come from the three purses of the dowry story.