The Christian Origins of Santa Claus

For a lot of Christians, Santa Claus feels like the competition. He's the guy in the red suit pulling attention away from the manger. Some equate him with paganism, commercialism, or the devil himself.

But here's what most people don't know: Santa started out as a pastor. A real one. A fourth-century bishop who loved Jesus, gave generously, and stood up for people who couldn't stand up for themselves.

Let's meet him.

Meet the real Nicholas

Nicholas was born in the late 200s in Patara, a port town on the southern coast of what's now Turkey. He became the bishop of nearby Myra, a city in a region called Lycia.

He lived through one of the hardest times to be a Christian. Under the Roman emperor Diocletian, churches were destroyed and believers were arrested. Tradition says Nicholas himself was imprisoned for his faith and later released when Constantine came to power.

He died on December 6, sometime around the middle of the 300s. That's why December 6 is still St. Nicholas Day in much of the world.

A quick honesty check: our earliest stories about Nicholas were written down well after he died. The oldest one dates from the 400s, and his first full biography came centuries later. So some details are legend. But historians who've studied the sources think the core stories likely go back to a real man, and they paint a pretty clear picture of who he was.

Three bags of gold

This is the story that started it all.

A man in Nicholas's town had lost everything. He had three daughters, and he couldn't afford a dowry for any of them. Back then, that meant no one would marry them. Their futures looked grim, and the father was considering something desperate.

Nicholas heard about it. So one night, he crept up to the man's house and tossed a bag of gold through the window. Then he slipped away before anyone could see him.

That gold paid for the oldest daughter's wedding. Later, Nicholas did it again for the second daughter. The third time, the father stayed up and caught him. Nicholas begged him not to tell anyone.

That's the whole point. Nicholas didn't want credit. He wanted to give the way Jesus taught: "When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret" (Matthew 6:3–4, ESV).

Sound familiar? Gifts that show up overnight, from someone you never see. That's where Santa begins.

Defender of the innocent

The oldest story we have about Nicholas isn't about gifts at all. It's about justice.

As it's told, three innocent men in Myra had been sentenced to death on false charges. Nicholas rushed to the place of execution, grabbed the executioner's sword, and stopped it. Then he confronted the official who had been bribed to condemn them until he admitted what he'd done.

Later in the same story, three army officers who had watched him do it were themselves falsely accused and thrown in prison. They prayed for Nicholas to help them, and he did.

That's the Nicholas the early church remembered: a pastor who protected people who had no one else on their side. Generous to the poor. Fearless for the innocent. That's a long way from a mall Santa, and a lot closer to Jesus.

"Didn't he punch a heretic?"

You've probably seen the memes. At the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, a teacher named Arius argued that Jesus wasn't fully God. Supposedly Nicholas got so fed up that he marched across the room and slapped him.

It's a great story. Unfortunately, it's almost certainly a legend.

Nicholas does show up on one early list of bishops at Nicaea, though historians debate how reliable that list is. But the slap doesn't appear in any ancient source. The earliest version only shows up in the Middle Ages, about a thousand years after the council, and even then he slaps "an Arian," not Arius himself.

So enjoy the meme. Just don't put it in a sermon as history.

From Saint Nicholas to Santa Claus

So how does a bishop from Turkey end up with reindeer? It took about 1,500 years.

In Europe, Nicholas became one of the most beloved saints in the church, especially as a protector of children. On his feast day, December 6, kids would wake up to small gifts, a nod to those bags of gold.

After the Reformation, many Protestants wanted the focus on Jesus, not the saints. So in parts of Germany, gift-giving moved to Christmas, and the gift-bringer became the Christkindl, the "Christ child." (Say Christkindl fast a few times and you'll hear where the name "Kris Kringle" came from.)

In the Netherlands, St. Nicholas never left. The Dutch called him Sinterklaas, and that's the name that eventually turned into "Santa Claus."

In America, a few New Yorkers in the early 1800s built the Santa we know:

• Washington Irving made St. Nicholas a playful character in his 1809 satire of New York's Dutch history. A later edition pictured him riding over the treetops in a wagon.
• John Pintard, founder of the New-York Historical Society, promoted St. Nicholas Day celebrations around 1810.
• An 1821 children's poem introduced "Santeclaus" with a reindeer and sleigh.
• In 1823, "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (you know it as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas") gave us the eight reindeer and the trip down the chimney.
• Starting in the 1860s, cartoonist Thomas Nast drew Santa for Harper's Weekly, adding the round belly, the North Pole, and the workshop.

And no, Coca-Cola didn't invent Santa's red suit. Santa was showing up in red long before the 1930s. Coke's ads just made that version famous.

So is Santa Christian?

Let's be honest. The Santa at the mall is mostly an American invention from the 1800s. The sleigh, the elves, the North Pole: none of that comes from the real Nicholas.

But the roots are Christian all the way down. Santa's name, his feast day, his secret gifts, and his love for kids all trace back to a bishop who followed Jesus. Even "Kris Kringle" is a garbled way of saying "Christ child."

So the question isn't really whether Santa is Christian. It's whether we'll remember the Christian he came from.

The bottom line

Santa doesn't have to compete with Jesus. The real Nicholas never would have wanted to.

He gave in secret because Jesus told him to. He protected the innocent because Jesus cared about them. Everything people loved about him pointed past himself to his Savior.

So this year, tell your kids about the real Saint Nicholas. Tell them about the bags of gold through the window and the bishop who grabbed the executioner's sword. Then tell them why he did it.

Because the best gift Nicholas ever pointed to wasn't gold. It was the one God gave in Bethlehem.