The History of Santa Claus

Introduction to ETSU

0:00At ETSU, you can choose from 85 online programs in fields like business, education, technology, nursing, healthcare, or social services. Or choose from a custom degree that fits your goals and interests. All taught by dedicated faculty here to support your success. With our flexible programs, affordable tuition, and accessible student resources, you don't have to change your life to change your future. Learn more and apply today at etsu.edu slash online. That's etsu.edu slash online. There are a lot of strange historical bits and pieces tangled up in the Festival of

0:35Christmas. In some ways, it's like looking at a painting that's had layer upon layer upon layer painted over it as the centuries have gone on. And in some places, the bits of paint have broken away and you can see outlines of things that are really very, very old underneath. But they've been traced over and new details have been added. And the overall effect is something that is at once very familiar and nostalgic because it's Christmas and that's just what Christmas looks like.

1:11But when you begin to look at it quite closely, it really begins to look very strange indeed. Take Santa Claus, for example. We have all these Christmas stories about a jovial fat man in a red suit who runs across the sky in a sleigh pulled by gravity-defying reindeer carrying gifts in a sack. That's a pretty strange story. And where did we get that story from anyway? And why did it

1:44become so dominant? Then there are other unexplained bits. Where did the 12 days of Christmas come from anyway? And why do some people call the Christmas season Yuletide? Well, the roots of some of this

Germanic Tribes Midwinter Festival

1:59go back a very long way indeed. All the way back to when Germanic tribes across Europe worshipped Woden, or Odin as he was later called. These Germanic tribes had a midwinter festival, which lasted twelve days. Twelve days. And during that festival, they kept a bonfire or a wood fire going all twelve days. If that begins to sound a lot like the twelve days of Christmas, it's because it is. And then there

2:31was Woden himself, one of the many deities they worshipped, who, at the time of this midwinter 12-day festival, was supposed to lead a hunt across the sky at night. And as time went on, the stories about Woden and the midwinter hunt in the sky developed, and eventually he was riding a horse that had eight legs. It got stranger and stranger. But you can begin to see why Santa Claus, who's clearly not quite human, is riding a sleigh across the sky in the middle of the night at this

3:06particular time of year. But scraping away centuries of accumulated stories and legends, there is another historical route to the Santa Claus figure. And far more inspiring than stories of a magical elf going across the sky with reindeer, it's a story about a love that is so powerful that it can seem

Introduction to Saint Nicholas

3:29like magic. But it's far more important. Let me introduce you to a man called Nicholas. There are many stories that have been told about him, but I'm going to stick to the ones that agree with history. You're listening to Villains and Virgins Podcast, and this is a very special Christmas episode on the history behind Saint Nicholas. Like many of you, I'm sure, I grew up surrounded by images of Santa Claus

4:00and didn't think much about it until I happened to stumble across some accounts that anchored the figure of Saint Nicholas into real history and the life of an actual person. So I'm excited to get into that story for you today and try to perform the very difficult task of parsing what is historically credible from what is utterly fantastic and legend, which has accumulated over time. But before we get into all of that, I'm going to pause and say thank you to all of you who are

4:32regular viewers of this podcast on YouTube or listeners wherever you stream your audio. It would be impossible to continue doing Villains and Virgins without you. So thank you for spending your time with me delving into all these historical stories. And I want to say a very special word of thanks to those people who have been staunch supporters of the podcast on Patreon, including at the very highest level. In particular, I want to thank John Lacasse,

5:02Stephen Skorick, Aaron Silverstein, Agnes Viner, Gordon Carl, Rick Kane, Anthony Farnbach, Tim Williams, Kenneth Jones, Charles Vineron, Richard Huebner, and Craig Davis. People who are supporters of Villains and Virgins podcast on Patreon have access to regular bonus episodes, including a growing back catalogue of previous bonus episodes ranging from Vikings on Crusade

5:35to the tales of epic medieval knights. So there's a lot there and more is being added every month. We also have live history chats where we get into all the details and the footnotes that I don't even have time to cover on the podcast, along with all of your other history questions and stories. So if you're interested in any of that, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert and become a supporter of Villains and Virgins podcast. And now let's get into our Christmas story.

Life of Saint Nicholas

6:08So this man called Nicholas was almost certainly an actual historical person. We've got many, many stories about the life of the man who's become known as Saint Nicholas and eventually as Santa Claus. But the difficulty is sifting back through all of these stories and trying to find out what is anchored in historical fact and what emerges in embellishments and retellings and legends that have proliferated around his name ever since. We do have a number of actual historical

6:41references to a real figure named Nicholas whose name and life details match the stories. Nicholas lived in the Eastern Roman Empire and he was born in about the year 275 AD. He was born in a town called Patara in the Roman province of Lycia in Asia Minor, a region that is now modern-day Turkey. So at this time, the Roman Empire hadn't yet been officially divided. It was sprawling. There was a western half, which mostly spoke Latin,

7:17and there was this growing eastern half of the Roman Empire, the spot where Nicholas was born. And in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, they spoke Greek. Nicholas was probably born into a family of lower-class artisans or merchants. These people had a little bit more money and as a result, Nicholas very likely received some form of education. He was born into a Christian family. Christians at this time in the Roman Empire were a cautious minority. They had experienced persecution under Emperor Valerian

7:53in the 250s, so this would have been in the experience of Nicholas's parents and extended family because he was born closer to 275. But it would have been a recent memory. However, despite many reports of Christians being persecuted in horrific ways in the Roman Empire, it's not accurate that persecution was a constant feature of their existence. In many cases, they were allowed to carry on and live their lives like everybody else because the Romans tolerated multiple religions. They were polytheists. They didn't really

8:28care who you worshipped at home as long as you stayed in line, followed the laws, and occasionally you were required to sacrifice to Roman gods, which is typically when Christians got into trouble. So there were these periods when Christians were persecuted and you'd see these spikes, but in many cases they were just left to go about their daily business. So there'd been a recent spike of persecution, things had quieted down, Nicholas was born, but he's born into a community where this is a very recent memory. But conditions for

9:01Christians in the Roman Empire weren't uniform. The Roman Empire was huge and how Christians were treated in a particular province under a particular governor could be quite different from how they were treated in other provinces farther away under different administration. Under the Emperor Diocletian, who began his reign in 284 when Nicholas was still a child, Christians were even members of the Imperial Court. They were part of the Emperor's personal entourage and some of them were even involved in managing the

9:33treasury. So being a Christian wasn't necessarily a bar to very important office. It depended where you were and when. Now keep Diocletian in mind because his reign goes from 284 to 305 and while most of it is a fairly calm, peaceful time for Christian minorities in the Roman Empire, the last two years from 303 to 305 are going to change dramatically. But by the time we get there, Nicholas will already be an adult. So

10:06that's going to re-enter our story a little bit later. The world of the Roman Empire that Nicholas is

Roman Empire Social Hierarchy

10:11born into in the 3rd century is a world of extremely sharp class divisions. At the top there are the very wealthy, the senatorial and knightly class, and these people own vast amounts of land. That is how they obtain their wealth. Everybody else basically pays rent on that land. So there's a high concentration of wealth in the hands of a relatively small group of people. So that's the upper class. There's a smaller middle class of merchants and artisans who are able to live relatively comfortably, and this is the strata

10:48that Nicholas is born into. But there are not that many of them. The largest class by far is the working poor. These are laborers who support the everyday functioning of the empire. They are the people who are planting the seeds, who are harvesting the crops, who are baking the bread, and their lives are ones of very much a hand-to-mouth existence. It's extremely tenuous. There is no social safety net. So if you get injured, if you get sick, if you're no longer able to labor for your daily wages,

11:25the chances that you'd be on the street begging or starving were excellent. And so you have to imagine the streets of the towns that Nicholas would have been familiar with, filled with people who don't have very much, with a good proportion of those people who've slipped into absolute destitution as well. It would have been a common sight. To add to all that, I need to mention another practice, which is horrifying when you think about it, and that is the Roman practice of exposure.

11:59The Romans, like the Greeks, had a practice of abandoning unwanted babies, newborns, and typically they would wrap that infant up and dump them at the nearest garbage heap. There were sometimes other places in the city where an abandoned newborn might be left, but the dunghill or the garbage heap was the most commonplace. And babies who were sickly, deformed, handicapped, or even female were often exposed or

12:30abandoned in this way. The Romans weren't the only people to do this. The Greeks were notorious for doing it as well. And we have writings from the Romans and the Greeks marveling at some of the barbarian peoples they encountered who raised all of their children. What a remarkable idea, because the Romans didn't do that. Extra children, unwanted children, bastard children, children that you felt you didn't have the money to raise or didn't want to spend money to raise, could simply be abandoned. Now in many cases,

13:05these tiny humans didn't survive very long. They were often eaten by dogs or other animals or died of exposure to the elements. But not always, because the practice was so common that there were other people who recognized that the local dump could be a source of free slave labor. In the following way, if you went to that dump and you collected a recently abandoned infant, and you took that child in and managed to feed it so that it survived into childhood, then that child could be sold as a slave. And so

13:41exposed infants were also a steady supply of slave labor for Rome, the ones that were rescued and survived. In the case of female infants, of course, this servitude frequently took the form of prostitution. So it's a grim world indeed that Nicholas has been born into, one in which human beings are regularly discarded when they are seen as not useful anymore, whether by virtue of injury, illness, or simply being

14:16unwanted. You probably thought this was going to be a Merry Christmas episode, right? Well, we'll get to that part later, but bear with me. As a young man, Nicholas would have been involved in training to be a priest or a leader in his local Christian community, and he may have traveled to a bigger city where he studied under a more prominent scholar. It's very likely that he would have studied the writings of earlier Christian thinkers, guys like Origen, who died in 255, or Polycarp, who preceded them by a century

14:47and died in 155. We can't know with any certainty which scholar Nicholas might have studied under, or what his curriculum of readings might have looked like, but we can be fairly confident about this. The idea of generosity, of charity, of deliberately giving to those people who were desperate and helpless was already very much a core idea of Christian practice in communities in the Roman Empire at this time. There are many stories of Christians deliberately going to local rubbish

15:24heaps to rescue exposed infants. These are the children of strangers, people that they do not know, who've been left there to die or to be collected by people who are going to attempt to sell them into slavery. And so the Christians who went to these places and collected other people's unwanted children were doing this out of a desire to rescue these tiny children from early death or a life of slavery.

15:54These ideas, which already existed in Christian practices and writings at the time, very clearly took root in Nicholas's character. Nicholas was probably serving in a pastoral role in his hometown by his early twenties, and this is where perhaps the most famous story of his life takes place. So in his hometown of Patara, there was a family where the mother had recently died, and the widowed father had three daughters. But he didn't have the money to supply these girls with a dowry, and at this time in the

16:31Roman Empire, it was expected that if a girl was going to be married, she would bring with her a sum of money or property into that marriage. This was something that made her eligible to marry, or desirable to marry, and this father simply didn't have the resources to supply his daughters with dowries. As a result of this, he was considering selling them into slavery or prostitution. This is a terrible thing to contemplate. A father selling his daughters into prostitution. I mean, couldn't he just have let

17:04them live in the house with him? It seems that dire poverty must have played a very significant role in this story. Either that or an extreme disregard for the well-being of daughters. The best comparison I can give you are circumstances that are going on in the world right now, in countries like Afghanistan, where families are facing a dire choice of starvation or selling their children, who are still very much children, into marriage. The idea of selling your child to somebody to serve

17:38essentially as a slave seems utterly unthinkable to you or me, but when it's a choice between doing that or watching them starve to death, it becomes a little bit easier to understand. It's no less horrific, but perhaps, and I speculate here, perhaps this was the situation of this family in Petara. Nicholas, who's serving as a priest in this community, gets wind of this situation, and the story is that he goes by their house in the middle of the night and drops a bag full of money into the

18:12house, maybe through the window. He somehow gets it in without being detected. And the family wake up in the morning and the father finds the money, and he joyfully uses it as a dowry for his first daughter. So she's safely and respectably married off. She's going to be spared this terrible fate. But there are still the other two daughters to be dealt with. So when Nicholas hears that they're still going to be facing the same circumstances, he goes by on a second night and drops a bag full of money in, and thus takes

18:44care of the second daughter, and then again on the third night. Now where did Nicholas get this money exactly? It very likely was his own inheritance, some money that he had from his slightly better off middle-class family, money that was intended to make him comfortable. Or possibly, and again I speculate here, it might have been a collection that he had assembled from other people in the community. Whatever the origin of the money, we have here a man who's going out of his way to hand over money

19:21that he could have kept for himself to help somebody else's children. The other important feature of this story is that the reason Nicholas is doing it in the middle of the night is because he wants to remain anonymous. He doesn't want the family to feel any obligation towards him. He doesn't want praise. He doesn't want credit. He just wants to spare these girls the terrible fate that awaits them. This story is the origin story of Santa Claus. And as the story has evolved over the centuries,

19:55one variant is that Nicholas drops one of the bags of money down the chimney to get it into the house undetected. But the difference between Santa Claus and Nicholas is that Santa Claus is bringing toys for children who don't have any real problems. And Nicholas is bringing money that is the difference between freedom and slavery. And this story, more than any of the other many stories that have been told about Nicholas is the one that is most consistent with the conditions of the world that he lived in

20:28and has most cemented his reputation. In other words, unlike many of the other later stories that have grown up around Saint Nicholas, this one is very likely to be true. Now we don't know much about the everyday details of this man called Nicholas who's a priest in Petara, but we do know that at some point he becomes Bishop of Myra. Now Myra was 50 kilometers east of his hometown of Petara, still in the province of Lycia in what is now modern Turkey. But Myra is a much bigger city, and being a bishop is a totally

21:05different position than being a local priest. Nicholas was probably in his early 30s when he took up this very important role, and that was extremely young to be appointed to a bishop, even by the standards of this time. But that meant that this appointment as bishop landed him right in the spotlight, right on time for

Persecution of Christians

21:27the next awful wave of Christian persecution. This next wave is going to last something like a decade, and it's horrific. So, Emperor Diocletian, who we talked about earlier, who became emperor when Nicholas was probably about nine years old, has been ruling since 284, and it's now 303. In the last two years of his reign, he embraces something like a very traditionalist ideology, and he basically says, well, I worship the gods of the Roman pantheon, and I think it would be a good idea if everybody else did

22:04too, and publicly. Let's return to the good old days of the Roman Empire, when everybody worshipped the same gods, and we had the same identity. And of course, this is very difficult because you have an empire at this point, not a republic. It's a huge administrative expanse. You have people from across the world who are part of that empire, and so making a demand of some kind of uniformity is going to be difficult. And it wasn't like he expected everyone to have exactly the same religion

22:34that he did. He just wanted public recognition of the Roman gods by everybody. He wanted this sort of public reverence or acknowledgement of the Roman pantheon. Now, this idea of a return to the recognition of Roman deities in public was probably influenced by a recent cycle of famines, disease, and military failures. So when things are going badly, you're looking for ways to explain that, and to say we've displeased the gods is a pretty reliable explanation that people come up with.

23:11So Emperor Diocletian turns to this explanation and he says, well, the answer is clearly that we need to regain the favour of the gods by performing this kind of public reverence to them. Like other emperors before him, Diocletian didn't care who you worshipped at home or what little shrine you set up inside the courtyard of your house. But in public, you needed to pay respect to the Roman deities. And so we can see that once he begins to make these proclamations in 303 and 304, Roman magistrates doing things like

23:45setting up temples in the courthouse. Because if you were going to pass a Roman temple, you had to pause and you had to, you know, show respect to the Roman deities. So now you can't access a Roman magistrate until you do the required obeisance to a Roman deity at the temple that's set up on your way in. So you can see how this would be a barrier to accessing justice quite literally for Christians who said, well, we're not going to do this. We're not going to make sacrifices in front of Roman altars.

24:17It's just not going to happen. So initially that resistance would just be a refusal of access to law enforcement, right? If you're not going to make the sacrifice at the temple inside the courthouse, then you can't see the judge, which means if you have a legal problem, like your neighbor stealing your land, you can't access legal help because you're not even going to get in to see the judge. So that would be a first order consequence. But things got a lot uglier very quickly. Very soon

24:48there are mobs who feel empowered by this new legislation to target Christians, and they're going after anyone who's known to be a Christian. And there are things like beatings and torture and imprisonment. In some provinces, some Christians are rounded up and sent to work as forced labor in the salt mines or just thrown into prison. So it becomes extremely traumatic and extremely painful for Christians very fast. The torture and maiming of prominent Christians, especially bishops,

25:21is something that is on record even years later when some of these survivors show up at church councils. And the written records we have of these proceedings indicate that this bishop was missing certain fingers or limbs or had scars as a result of this period. So all of this goes on for about a decade, until between 311 and 313 when it finally settles down. And by this point Diocletian is gone. I mean, he's no longer emperor as of 305, but his successors carry this on for some years. What happened to

25:58Nicholas in this time is a matter that we have questions about. It seems very likely that as a bishop who would be a prominent, well-known Christian leadership figure, that he would have been a target for this kind of abuse. And so he might have spent some period of time in prison. That seems very likely. But other historians who have studied these accounts say that the fact that Nicholas lived to a ripe old age and there aren't any terrible stories of torture or maiming suggests that he might have

26:30pursued a different strategy and that he might have gone underground and done his best to try and avoid being visible and being caught in this wave. We don't know how Nicholas handled it. We do know that he survived. The reason all of this persecution settles down in the year 313 AD is that by this point, Constantine is the emperor and he makes an edict that pronounces Christianity as legal in the empire. So it's an edict of toleration, meaning Christians can no longer be targeted just for their religious

27:04beliefs. So when this proclamation is made, Christians who have been imprisoned for their religion are let go. People who are serving in forced labor for the crime of their beliefs are freed. And so this allows Christian communities to slowly reassemble and to deal with the survivors and to try and slowly rebuild their shattered communities. Nicholas is restored to his community in Myra, so he's once again serving

Nicholas as Bishop of Myra

27:33publicly as their bishop. And this is where one of the next stories of his life emerges. So at one point, the city of Myra is in desperate straits. There's been a very bad harvest. There's not enough food and famine looms. But there are grain ships that are docking at the port of Myra on their way to Constantinople. So they're not planning to offload anything, they're just putting into port, they're resupplying themselves and they're carrying on. Nicholas, as the bishop, goes to the ship's captains and he

28:06intercedes and he says, you're carrying all of this grain. The people in this city are absolutely desperate. They're going to be dying in large numbers. Please leave some of your grain here. Presumably he offered to buy it. We don't know what the details of that negotiation were. It seems that the captains of the ships probably expressed some concern saying, we're supposed to arrive in Constantinople with this much grain. It's going to be weighed. What's going to happen to us if we offload some of it here with you? But whatever he said, Bishop Nicholas was

28:39persuasive. So he gets these captains to leave some portion of grain behind in Myra before they sail on to Constantinople. And he distributes this grain to the desperate population. So some of it is used immediately to satisfy hunger and to stave off starvation. But some portion of it is also set aside to be planted. So when he's securing grain to be planted for the next harvest in Myra, he's looking out for the survival not only of the Christians in his congregation, but for everyone

29:12else who lives in that city, including the non-Christians, some of whom might have been involved in persecuting Christians in that community, and other minorities like Jews who lived in small pockets throughout the empire as well. Now there's one more story about Nicholas as Bishop of Myra that seems historically credible. So the story goes that three innocent people had been convicted of a crime they didn't commit by a local magistrate. And this is because that local magistrate had just accepted a

29:43bribe. So he'd been paid off to come to a certain verdict, and these three people were now facing the death sentence. So Bishop Nicholas rushes over to get to the execution spot on time so that he can intervene and stop the execution. He's supposedly accompanied by some visiting Roman officials who've heard about this. Corruption of magistrates is a serious charge. So he stops the execution, and he turns around and goes to visit the Roman magistrate in his house and charges him. Says, you accepted a bribe. The verdict

30:18you gave had nothing to do with evidence or justice and everything to do with money. And the magistrate admits it, and he says, well it wasn't me, it was this other guy, and there are two men who are named as sort of wealthy men who paid him off in order to achieve a particular verdict. The upshot is the three innocent people were spared, and the bribery was called out. So we see Nicholas once again jumping in and interceding for people who otherwise would have been helpless in the face of conditions being

30:50inflicted upon them. Now as a result of these stories, and then various versions and retellings and duplicate stories that have grown up around them, Nicholas has become known as the patron saint of children, of convicts, and even of sailors, along with many, many other groups. In the Greek tradition, his name, Nicholas, and I'm probably mispronouncing that by Greek standards, but the meaning of that name means victor for the people. So his name itself has become bound up with this idea of being a champion for

31:27everyday, ordinary human beings. Now at some point after his death, Nicholas is declared a saint. And this is another curious fact, because in many cases, people who are declared saints are people who have often died in terrible ways as a result of their faith. And that is not the case for Nicholas. The reports we have are that he died in his bed at an advanced age. So the reason for his canonization, or his

31:57recognition as a saint, has to do with the moral excellence of his life, and not with achieving a death by martyrdom. Once again, this is a fact that gives some credibility to the stories of his life that show him interceding as a champion for the poor. Saint stories often involve miracles. In fact, it's a criteria for being declared a saint. And so, of course, there are many stories of Nicholas that involve him performing miraculous acts, such as stopping a storm, and saving ships, and this sort of thing. I haven't recounted

32:34those stories. They're somewhat formulaic. You have to come up with these stories in order for a person to be declared a saint. We don't have historical documentation for them, so I haven't spent a lot of time detailing those parts of his legend. And his legend has grown enormously. The amazing thing about Nicholas and his legend is that it's so large that it's known on both sides of the Christian world, the eastern and the western side. Now, in his lifetime, the Christian world wasn't divided in this way at all. Christians

33:09were a small community inside the Roman Empire. But seven centuries later, in 1054, we have an event that historians call the Great Schism, which divides the Christian world into a western Latin-speaking half centered in Rome under the Pope, and an eastern Greek-speaking half centered in what was then Constantinople and is now Istanbul under a patriarch. And so, the Christian world bifurcates in 1054,

33:40and we have Latin Christians, later to be known as Roman Catholic or Catholics, and Eastern Christians, later to be known as Orthodox of many variations. Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox, and so on. And in many ways, after 1054, the Christian world is divided. These two halves go their separate ways, and they develop their own traditions, and their own saints, and their own observances, and different dates for things like Easter. And yet, for all those differences that

34:15have grown up over the centuries, Saint Nicholas is known on both sides of that divide. And that is a remarkable thing. Across the churches of the Eurasian steppe in the Orthodox tradition, Saint Nicholas is incredibly popular. There are icons bearing his figure that can be found throughout these churches. Saint Nicholas's Day, his Saint Day, is celebrated on December 19th, in Eastern Orthodox churches. And in Western Christian churches, in the Catholic tradition, it's celebrated on December 6th.

34:51His bones are said to rest in a cathedral in Bari, Italy, although this has been disputed, with some people claiming that the Italians who carried his bones out of Turkey and into Italy got the wrong skeleton, that they were given a decoy skeleton so that the real bones of Saint Nicholas could continue resting safely in a secret place. Now, as the centuries have rolled on, many, many stories have grown up around Saint Nicholas, who is such a favorite and revered figure. Some of them involve

35:24things like the miraculous resupply of grain on these ships that he interceded with, that when they left grain behind for him in Myra and sailed on to Constantinople, when they weighed their supplies, they found that the weight was the same. It was as though they'd never left anything behind. There is one story that was penned much later, in the medieval period, which involves three boys. And so the story goes that there was a famine going on, that meat had disappeared altogether,

35:55and there was one butcher who was claiming that he still had salted meat for sale. And Bishop Nicholas says, well, where is this meat coming from? Where are you getting it? And he walks into the shop, goes into a back room, and finds the bodies of three murdered boys. So this butcher has been surreptitiously murdering children, and then preparing their flesh and selling it as animal meat. Nicholas is, of course, horrified, and miraculously resurrects the boys, bringing them back to life

36:27and saving them from this grisly fate. While the stories that have emerged over time grow increasingly fanciful and miraculous, the theme is the same, that Nicholas is always a figure who intercedes for ordinary people, for the poor, for the ones that everyone else forgot, for the ones who are helpless. That is the truth at the center of all of the stories and legends that have grown up around him. And that, perhaps, is why he's so beloved across both the eastern and western parts of the Christian world.

37:04So the story of Saint Nicholas, as a man who gives gifts to children, who drops gifts into houses in the middle of the night, who exemplifies benevolence and generosity, have multiplied over time. And there are many variations. There are stories of Saint Nicholas as someone who was a toy maker, which developed centuries later, who would go around giving toys to children. There are many versions that have been developed on this theme. But it's not hard to see why everybody loves the figure. I mean, who doesn't

37:37love someone who's so overflowing with benevolence and generosity, that they just want to give gifts to everybody. So Saint Nicholas becomes Saint Nick, who's also known as Father Christmas, Sinterklaus, or Santa Claus, as those stories have traveled to different parts of the world over time. And more and more stories have been added as different communities in their own parts of the world have added their own flavors to this pot and inflected the story with their own traditions and their own

38:11local colors. But when you scrape back through all these layers, it becomes apparent that the original figure of Saint Nicholas, as a man who showed up for the poor, the desperate, and the unwanted, is become very different from the all-too-familiar version of Santa Claus that we know today. Let's just begin with Santa Claus himself. He's an enormous figure, a jolly fat man in a red suit,

38:45who apparently eats milk and cookies at every single house as he makes his way around the world. So his appetites are excessive, just as his girth is overly large. And he brings with him a large sack of gifts, well-wrapped toys and baubles for little children in households that have the money to participate in a festival that's increasingly become about buying more, more, and more. The original Saint Nicholas, by contrast, gave gifts at night so that he could be anonymous, nameless.

39:22He intervened to help people who were so desperate that they had no other recourse. The gifts he gave weren't bits of plastic that would soon be forgotten. They were things like grain in a time of starvation, or freedom to those people facing a lifetime of slavery. And for me at least, the magic of Christmas has always been much less about what needless luxury may I receive, and much more about what can I give

39:54to somebody who truly needs it. You've been listening to Villains and Virgins Podcast, and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas.