“How to tell your child the truth about Santa?”
Among the countless daily trifles that our society has turned into serious psychological problems, there is also this one.
New York Times, CNN, BBC have all addressed the annoying question in at least one report, interviewing experts and dispensing advice to the hyper-anxious parents of the digital age.

Even the most popular ‘mommy blogs’ have grappled with the dilemma, which roughly sums up as follows: “Will your children ever trust you again, once they find out that you lied to them about Santa?“

The stance that prevails among experts, from what I understand, recalls what Italian socialists told about the first World War: “Neither sabotage nor enable”.
If the child wants to believe in Santa, allow him to do so, but do not embellish the story with additional details of your own making.
If he stops believing through his own critical thinking, do not strive to keep him in the darkness of superstition.
At most, to prevent your skeptical child from spoiling the magic for the other children and causing you embarrassment with the other mothers, you might answer to certain technical questions (“How do all those presents fit into a sleigh?“) that you don’t know.

A kernel of truth that is also good for adults

Now, this debate will seem surreal to most people, but to me it seems quite surreal.
Firstly because I was unfortunately one of those creepy children who, at the age of five, did a rough calculation of how many presents had to be delivered per minute by Santa in order to get the job done in a single night, realising that the whole story was a hoax.

Secondly, because I am now (from bad to worse!) a Catholic parent, and so I know that Coca-Cola’s red Santa is just the latest of many metamorphoses of Nicholas of Myra, the patron saint of children.
A saint who was perhaps the most loved and celebrated one after Mary.

Once you skim off the marketing details such as the elves and the reindeer sleigh, you come across a popular tradition that has lasted for centuries: St Nicholas bringing gifts to children on a December night.
And, if one digs even beneath the tradition, one finds a kernel of historical truth about the life of a man who was indeed extraordinary.

We Catholics even allow ourselves to think that this man could continue to do something for us even now from heaven. It is an assertion that logical reasoning cannot confirm but also cannot disprove, that has completely harmless consequences on ethical field, and that anyone is therefore free to accept at any stage of his life, at three years of age as at ninety.

Thus, unlike the psychologists of the New York Times, I find myself lucky enough not to have to change the narrative about ‘Santa’ from a certain point onwards in my children’s lives (except for a few minor details, such as the delivery of toys, which, by the way, I like regardless of who gave them and the vehicle by which they were delivered).

But who was Nicholas, and why is he associated with gifts and children?

Three gifts in the night

Nicholas was born in Myra, Asia Minor, between 260 and 270.
His family must have been wealthy, if we are to believe the most famous episode told about his youth: when he heard that a father who had fallen into poverty wanted to send his three daughters into prostitution, Nicholas waited until nightfall and secretly went and threw three bags of gold coins into their house so that each girl could have a dowry and save his honour.

One version of the story says that Nicholas threw the bags on three different nights, waiting until the first-born had finished her wedding feast before helping the second sister.
When only the last sister was still to be helped, the girls’ father stayed up late into the night, hoping that the mysterious benefactor would return, to discover his identity and thank him face to face.
Little did he know that this late-night wait would be the first of a long series….

Nicholas would have made this generous deed before becoming a priest or a bishop, before holding any public office and being famous in any way, according to some even before his parents died, sneaking money out of their coffer.
All this makes the tale plausible, but also encouraging: if he did it, anyone could do it. A true ‘miracle next door’.

Wheat and justice

Once became an adult, around 300 Nicholas was chosen as bishop by the Christian community of Myra. Just in time to suffer Diocletian’s persecution, perhaps the bloodiest of the persecutions of Christians in the first three centuries. After Diocletian, it was Licinius’ turn to rage against the followers of the new religion.

When Constantine finally arrived, things calmed down. Apparently, when there was a famine in the region, Nicholas even managed to convince the new ruler to support his inhabitants with public resources.
In fact, it is told that some ships, which were sailing to the capital Constantinople to supply it with Egyptian grain, called at Myra, where Nicholas begged the sailors to give some of the grain to his starving people, promising that he would persuade the emperor not to punish them for it.
The episode, in some texts, is also recounted with supernatural overtones: once landed in Constantinople, the sailors would find their cargo intact again.

Halfway between history and fable is also another tale about Nicholas and Constantine: the emperor was about to send three innocent generals to death, when the saint appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to release them. Since then, St Nicholas has been the patron saint of victims of miscarriages of justice.

Fighting on the seas

The patronage over the sailors, on the contrary, was earned by Nicholas with an even more spectacular apparition: in the midst of the fury of a storm, in order to save the crew of a ship, he materialised on deck and physically helped the sailors to steer it into port by toiling side by side with them.

The story is undoubtedly not very credible (even though self-encouraging hallucinations are not uncommon in times of collective danger, and no one can guarantee that they are not ‘sent from above’…) but it was enough to create a special relationship between St Nicholas and the city of Bari.
In 1087, in fact, the old pearl of the Adriatic was disputing the maritime routes to the East with Venice. The two maritime republics, so, started a competition to steal St Nicholas’ bones from the city of Myra before the Turks occupied it.
As is well known in Italy, Bari came out on top.

The children’s friend

Bari and Venice, however, were by no means the only medieval cities fond of the old saint. Everywhere in Europe, more or less far-fetched legends flourished about him, and it is here that we find the basis of his role as a friend of children.
Here, then, are the tales where St Nicholas resurrects three children who had been killed and put to dry in salt by an evil innkeeper; or St Nicholas appears to a pagan king in Poland to prevent him from sacrificing his son to the gods; or St Nicholas teleports home the son of a peasant who had been enslaved by Muslims, and so on.

It was Northern Europe, however, and especially the Netherlands, that gave birth to the tradition of giving gifts to children on the night of St Nicholas (6 December), claiming that it was he who brought them.
When the Calvinists, hostile to the cult of saints, gained the upper hand between the 16th and 17th centuries, they found this ‘papist superstition’ a very hard opponent.
We can have fun running through the list of decrees and ordinances that the Dutch city-states issued against the rite of the gifts of St Nicholas, which were as numerous as they were evidently useless.

In Grave, for example, the decree read: ‘As it has been noticed that the celebration of St Nicholas drives many fearful people to considerable expense and stimulates the youth towards superstition, the magistrate of the town of Grave, wishing to prevent such an abuse, has forbidden and forbids from now on all citizens and inhabitants of this town, to practise the aforementioned superstition or to have their children practise it‘.

Similar laws were made in Arnhem, Utrecht and in Amsterdam itself: ‘Since the magistrates have become aware that in past years, despite the publication of specific local regulations, on the eve of St. Nicholas, various people have stood on the St. Nicholas Church. Since the magistrates have become aware that in past years, despite the publication of specific local regulations, various people have stood on the dike and in other places in the city with sweets, food and other merchandise, so as to attract large crowds from all parts of the city, the same magistrates, in order to prevent such disturbances and to eliminate from the minds of young people the superstitions and papist fables, have ordered, established and declared that on St Nicholas’ Eve no one, whoever he may be, may go on the dike or in other places or streets of this city, with any kind of sweets, food or other merchandise.

From Netherlands to America

In the meantime, however, when in 1626 a Dutch ship sailed to the New World to build a New Amsterdam, it relied on the protection of St Nicholas. Sailors, it is known, are superstitious.

Over the years, New Amsterdam became New York. Here, at the beginning of the 19th century, the writer Washington Irving, reconstructing with humour the epic of the founding of the city, recounted: ‘In those far-off years the pious ceremony was instituted, still religiously observed in all our old families of good tradition, of hanging a stocking under the chimney on the eve of St Nicholas. That stocking in the morning is always found miraculously full, because good St Nicholas has always been a great giver of gifts, especially to children’.

From ‘Sinterklaas‘, the Dutch name for St Nicholas, would eventually be born in the USA the secular and consumerist ‘Santa Claus‘.
A childish myth that today some consider to be uneducational, unfortunately also within the same Catholic world that gave rise to it.
Others, exaggerating in the opposite direction, fanatically defend their children’s right to believe in Santa Claus, perhaps seeing in him the last vestige of magical and supernatural illusions in a world that seems to have banished them forever.

Well, it may be that getting to know the saint behind the myth, and then getting to know the man behind the saint, can help us have a more balanced relationship with this latest imaginary creature that insinuates itself into our lives.

Unless we take a perverse and conscious pleasure in believing in imaginary creatures, whereby from Santa we move on to the ‘Nazis in Kiev’, the ‘globalist elite’ and the ‘self-repaying public debt’.
But in such cases there is little to be done.