Saint Nicholas

Bishop

Feast Day

December 6

Life

270–343

Born

Patara, Lycia (modern Turkey)

Nicholas was Bishop of Myra in Lycia (a Greek-speaking province of southern Asia Minor) in the early fourth century. The earliest reliable sources record him as one of the bishops who had suffered imprisonment in the persecution of Diocletian (303-311) and emerged to attend the Council of Nicaea in 325, where he is said by some lists (though not the most ancient ones) to have been among the 318 fathers who condemned Arianism. Beyond these few facts the historical record is sparse, but his cult was extraordinarily strong already by the sixth century, when the Emperor Justinian I rebuilt a basilica in his honor at Constantinople.

The tradition that gave rise to his patronage of children and to the Santa Claus folk-figure is the famous story, recorded in his earliest hagiography by Saint Symeon the Metaphrast, that on three successive nights Nicholas secretly threw bags of gold through the window of an impoverished neighbor whose three daughters would otherwise have been sold into prostitution for lack of dowries; the gold supplied each daughter's marriage portion. From this come the tradition of secret gift-giving on his feast and the association with stockings hung by the chimney. After centuries of Muslim incursions in Asia Minor, sailors from the Italian port of Bari took Nicholas's relics from Myra in 1087 and brought them to Bari, where they remain in the Basilica of Saint Nicholas, an extraordinary site of Catholic-Orthodox shared veneration. He is one of the most beloved saints of both East and West.