The Truth About About Santa Claus

Nick's done more for the wee ones of the world than to simply command his elven hive to build Tonka trucks. According to one fable, Nicholas met an innkeeper who butchered three kids and pickled them during a famine so he could try to pass them off as ham. After God's cosmic prodding led Nicholas to their corpses, he prayed to divinely stitch their little salty dismembered bodies back together. Metropolitan Museum of Art "From this day forth, you will be known as 'The Pickle Triplets' and possess all the powers of sodium.

We're not saying that you should build a trio of barfy gherkin golems on Christmas Eve instead of gingerbread men And if you won't do that, at least don some Vlasic-soaked rags and dress up as St. Nick's jaunty archnemesis "The Cannibal Hotelier" to spook the neighborhood carolers with some briny pranks. Santa Claus doesn't live in the North Pole.

No, he lives all across Europe, in many different countries, a little bit here, a little there. You see, in , Italian sailors stole St. Nicholas' remains from Turkey in a harrowing heist that involved hoodwinking some monks and escaping an angry mob of villagers. His holly-jolly bones were laid to rest in Bari, Italy, where they currently reside, much to the chagrin of Turkish Santaphiles. To make matters more confusing, an abbey in Ireland claims to possess his body , and a bunch of random body parts said to belong to St. Surly are strewn all over the globe as relics. So if Santa doesn't get you what you want for Christmas this year, try writing to his tooth in Germany the next.

Berolinensis "Dear molar, I want an Xbox. He's currently working on a wildly uncelebrated free e-book called "A Chris Christmas Carol.

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Add me to the daily newsletter. And yet we never really wonder where the heck the man in red came from, what his story is, or why he doesn't get annihilated by the laws of physics. Now here it is at last, the mostly complete, untold truth of Saint Nick. In or around the year A.

Anyway, according to NBC News , Nicholas became a bishop as a young man, which must have pleased the hell out of his mom. He then became locally famous for anonymously paying the dowries of girls from poor families.

Sinterklaas

Apparently anonymity was hard, since he became famous for it. Nicholas was also known for leaving coins or other treats in the shoes of local children, and eventually the little punks came to expect it and would leave their shoes out on purpose in the hope of finding something good inside them the next day. In traditional images, Nicholas is usually portrayed wearing a red cloak, much like our modern Santa only more bishopy.

He is also said to have had a small orphan boy working as his helper, who was more or less the first elf.

Nicholas died on December 6, which is well within the season of holiday shopping frenzy, and was shortly thereafter canonized as the patron saint of children. After his death, people honored him each year with a December 6 feast and carried on the tradition of leaving gifts in children's shoes. For a while, St. Nicholas was mostly a Dutch thing. Protestantism frowned upon the celebration of saints as a form of idolatry, so parents had to tell their kids that not only was St. Nicholas forbidden but also they wouldn't be getting any presents on December 6.

Now just imagine for a moment if everyone said that to their kids today: Nicholas got the Protestant boot, people mostly stopped celebrating December 6, with the exception of the Dutch , who were all, "To hell with you and your dumb rules" and went on with the feasting and the gift giving anyway. By the Middle Ages, he was assisted by elves, he had some cool Santa magic that got him and and out of chimneys, and although he hadn't yet discovered flying reindeer he did seem to have at least one flying horse.

Incidentally, in order to get a gift you were expected to leave some treats out for the horse, which explains why Sinterklaas hadn't yet reached traditional Santa Claus rotundity. Cookies would come in later centuries. Other European cultures maintained some form of St. Nicholas, too — in Britain he was known as "Father Christmas," though back then he was mostly just an annoying guy who wandered around town and invited himself over to random houses for Christmas dinner.

Besides being the ancient equivalent of that lonely guy at work who's always hinting that maybe he should come over to your house for Christmas this year, Father Christmas lived in the far north, which explains why no one was ever able to track him down and arrest him for trespassing and home invasion. As if Father Christmas wasn't weird enough, there were also the German gift-givers, who were a clever way of skirting the Protestant moratorium on St. According to National Geographic , the Germans just moved the gift-giving day to Christmas because who could argue with that?

There were a few logistical problems to sort out, though — since Baby Jesus was technically an infant and therefore unable to carry million gifts around, the Germans gave him some assistants. These assistants weren't jolly, though, because the Germans also knew that you could make kids behave by saying things like "he sees you when you're sleeping," which is freaking terrifying. So the German gift-givers brought gifts but also whipped or kidnapped naughty kids, which made them early versions of modern Stalker Santa.

Long before the Germans, the Norse had their own story of a terrifying gift-giver who would show up during the winter festival. According to the Norwegian American , on the night of the winter solstice, the God Odin would fly around on an eight-legged horse, terrorizing anyone unfortunate enough to be out after dark, which kinda sounds like it might be the origin story for Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.

If he got bored with the whole running-down-innocent-pedestrians thing, Odin might also turn into smoke and come down your chimney, which is obnoxiously creepy. It's so creepy that it's a wonder most Norse children didn't die from heart attacks when they began to understand that a psychopathic god was going to turn into smoke and come down their chimney. Still, kids would leave their boots next to the fire and then cower in terrified anticipation, and if Odin was feeling generous he would fill their boots with candy and toys.

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If you thought it couldn't get creepier than those German gift-givers, well, it could and it definitely did. Once in America, all these different versions of Saint Nicholas mingled and popularized until one day in when Washington Irving decided to put a sort of merged version of them into a book called Knickerbocker's History of New York. The story was the first to portray St. Nicholas in a flying wagon, delivering presents only to well-behaved kids. Everyone else got a switch. Nicholas a new name: In this portrayal, Sante Claus came from the north in a sled pulled by a single reindeer, and he arrived on Christmas Eve.

He also brought only toys that weren't annoying, which meant no drums or toy pistols, and presumably nothing that comes in impenetrable plastic bubbles that can only be breached with a large steak knife with millions of twist ties that have to be individually undone while the gift recipient whines with righteous impatience. The good old days.

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According to Business Insider , Santa Claus as we know him arrived in , a fully fleshed-out amalgamation of St. In "Twas The Night Before Christmas," which is still a traditional Christmas Eve read for families all over the world, Santa was portrayed as a rotund, "jolly old elf" who arrived in a flying sled pulled by not one but eight reindeer.

Santa and his posse were diminutive, which explains how he could get down the chimney, but other than that they were pretty much exactly as we know them today. Since its original publication, "Twas The Night Before Christmas" has been reprinted more times than anyone can count, in more languages than anyone can say, which is a crazy amount of pressure to put on the man in red, who started life delivering gifts to a few village kids in Turkey and now has the monumental task of spoiling the entire surface of the planet.

Although we hate to think of Santa as ever being anything less than jolly, it's probably a safe bet that he occasionally gazes in resentment at that original copy of "Twas The Night Before Christmas. Because communism is all about making everything not as much fun anymore , the rise of the Soviet Union was followed almost immediately by the fall of Santa, or "Father Frost" as he was known in Russia. Like Sinterklaas, Father Frost brought gifts to children on Christmas, and the communists just couldn't have that, because … no one is exactly sure but it probably had something to do with communists being giant poopy-heads.

Communism wasn't terribly popular with the people, although no one could actually say so out loud, but Business Insider says that by the s Joseph Stalin was starting to get that his people weren't exactly throwing roses and underpants at him when he appeared in public. So he brought back holiday gift giving, but at New Years instead of Christmas. That was okay, apparently, because New Years was a secular holiday and therefore magical, gift-bringing elves could show up as long as they didn't have anything to do with Jesus, or something.

Stalin even put Father Frost in a blue coat instead of a red one, just so no one would confuse him with Santa, who was totally different even though the two traditions were, you know, pretty much exactly the same. The original Saint Nicholas didn't have a wife because bishops mostly didn't do that in the fourth century A. Still, according to Mental Floss , Santa remained mysteriously unwed until the middle of the 19th century, which ultimately shouldn't surprise anyone.

Just imagine his Match.

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