For our last look at Christmas, I want to focus on the person who has become the center of the American Christmas tradition: St. Nicholas, or as he is more commonly known, Santa Claus.

We all know the bearded, jolly old man dressed in red and fur, who spends Christmas Eve delivering gifts to children all over the world, with the aid of his elves and flying reindeer. Santa as we know him evolved as an amalgam of several different figures, and really took off in popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the work of various poets and writers and storytellers.

The British legend Father Christmas, as seen in A Christmas Carol as the “Ghost of Christmas Present”, was one of the chief influences of our modern Santa. The Dutch figure Sinterklaas, whose name is a poor transliteration of “Saint Nicholas” is another. But most commonly, we associate Santa with the historical figure of St. Nicholas.

St. Nicholas was a Greek bishop, in the city of Myra, now in modern day Turkey. Born into great wealth, his parents died while he was young and he inherited their fortune. The attribution of gift giving, especially to children, arose from Nicholas’ giving away his entire fortune through anonymous giving to those in need. St. Nicholas is also reported to have freed slaves, rescued girls from brothels, and saved sailors from vicious storms. He is the patron saint of (appropriately) sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, and pawnbrokers.

But the best story about St. Nicholas arises from his attendance at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE. This council is the one that gave us the Nicene Creed, and was called by the Emperor Constantine after this proclamation of Christianity as the empire’s religion to help streamline an imperial theology.

The main point of conflict arose over what is now known as the Arian Heresy. Arius, another church father, asserted that the nature of the relation of Christ to God was an unequal one; God was of a greater or more holy substance than Jesus, and thus Jesus was reckoned just below God in the holy hierarchy. The opposing argument, of which St. Nicholas ascribed to, was that God and Jesus were of the same substance, and thus co-equal. This difference consumed the council, and drug the meeting out for a month. It was during one particularly vicious verbal scrum that St. Nicholas distinguished himself by approaching Arius and punching him in the face. According to rumor, St. Nicholas was paid back by having a supporter of Arius, Eusebius, urinate on his cloak.

And you thought these old councils were boring and stuffy.

So, as we go about our Christmas traditions this year, and spread stories of Santa Claus and his mystical gift giving, I think it’s important to keep this picture in mind:

Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays everybody. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and learned something new and interesting.

I know this series has been pretty heavy so far, with a lot of Biblical analysis and deep dives into scholarship and language and theology. So, I want to finish with a couple of posts on “lighter” topics: the date of December 25th, and St. Nick (or Santa Claus.)

Obviously, we celebrate Christmas, and thus the birth of Christ, on December 25th. But why? There is no Biblical tradition of Jesus being born on this day. In fact, to judge from the stories of the Nativity, if you just look at what is recounted, it makes no sense for the story to be taking place in deep winter. First, if shepherds were out in the field, this indicates pasturing season, March to September. Second, it is highly unlikely that if Joseph were going to take his very pregnant wife on a long journey to Bethlehem, that he would do it in the deepest, darkest part of winter. Not exactly the best weather for travel by foot or donkey.

But, that is all speculation, as we have now by this point in the series determined those details to be highly symbolic myth. So we are left with our original question: Why December 25th?

There are two main competing theories, one of which I’m sure you’re familiar with, the other not so much.

The most common theory is that December 25th was chosen to supersede pagan holidays. Late December was the time of year for two major Roman holidays: Saturnalia, which had been practiced since ancient times, and the Feast of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), instituted in 274 CE by Emperor Aurelian. The Germanic holiday of Yule was also fairly well known.

The idea is that Christians of the time (3rd-4th century CE) wanted to use the popularity of these pagan festivals to “piggy back” their celebration of the birth of the Messiah. And there is some truth here, in that early Christian’s writing around the time of the inauguration of Sol Invictus answered the Emperor’s new holiday by proclaiming Jesus to be the true “Unconquered Sun.” An anonymous tract from around that time states,

“But Our Lord, too, is born in the month of December … the eight before the calends of January [25 December] …, But they call it the ‘Birthday of the Unconquered’. Who indeed is so unconquered as Our Lord…?”

There was clearly some effort by contemporary Christians to try to undercut the new holiday by proclaiming Jesus as the one worthy of celebration and reverence.

Beyond that, however, it seems unlikely that the identification with pagan festivals was primary consideration. Christians of the time, working in a very pluralistic religious atmosphere, were eager to distance their religion from the many, many others. It seems highly unlikely that Christians looking to highlight the exceptional nature of their faith would deliberately go about making decisions that obscured it in the face of other, more popular occurrences.

Further, the first mention of Christmas being a response specifically to pagan holidays wasn’t recorded until the 12th century. Surely, if this was the prime motivating factor, one of the many Christian literary sources we have available to us from this time would make some mention or allusion to such an act.

The second major theory is that of a divine connection between Jesus’ conception and death. Early Christian theorists deduced that Jesus’ death took place on March 25. This just so happens to be exactly nine months before December 25th.

Now, while that seems a lucky coincidence, it is actually an intentional connection being made by early writers. In Jewish tradition, the confluence of important dates was a common literary practice. For instance, rabbinic scholars of around the same time posited that the Jewish date of 14 Nisan was the date of the completion of creation, the beginning of the Exodus, and the birth of various Patriarchs. The idea that many important events happened across the years on a common day was an indication of God at work in the world.

Thus, Jesus being conceived on the same day he died was a way for early Christian writers to indicate Jesus’ ultimate fate as the Savior of mankind by his death was preordained from birth, and before even that. The connection was deliberately made between these two events to establish the role of Jesus in God’s divine plan. And so, by logical deduction, they were able to assert his birth as exactly nine months later: December 25.

Neither of these theories wholly explains to choice of this specific date. Rather, both probably played a small contributing role in a process that spanned centuries, and was fairly organic in it’s evolution.

For instance, December 25th wasn’t even a consensus choice. There was much early debate about January 6th being the correct date. Eventually, the Orthodox Church in the East selected the January date as their Christmas, a tradition that carries down to today. The Western church went with December 25, and picked January 6 as Epiphany (the Adoration of the Magi from the East) instead. (Early writers in the Orthodox tradition even went so far as to repudiate the conception date of March 25 by asserting that April 6 was the correct day.)

Up until the early Middle Ages, Epiphany held much more importance than Christmas did. As the conflict between east and west began to intensify, the west began to emphasize instead the importance of Advent, and the 12 days of Christmastide that followed (December 25-January 5.) The importance of the date of Christmas seems to have had a secular spur as well, with the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne choosing it as his coronation date in 800 CE, and King William I of England following suit in 1066. With these celebrations of the anniversaries of the coronations, Christmas became more and more popular.

The supposed roots of Christmas in pagan festivals was bolstered by splinter religious groups like the Puritans, who refused to celebrate it because of it’s supposed pagan links and influences. Modern day 7th Day Adventists picked up this stream of thought from their founding in the mid-19th century. The modern celebration of a more secular Christmas on December 25th, with presents and Santa Claus, gained steam in the 19th century, carrying on to a more Enlightened and secular world to today’s highly commercialized holiday.

The choice of December 25 is far from a conscious decision of the church. It is instead the product of 2000 years of tradition and wrangling and just plain dumb luck.

There is no more central figure to Judaism than Moses. He is originator of the nation of Israel, God’s chosen who led the people out of slavery in Egypt, gave them God’s law, and brought them to the Promised Land. If Jesus is the key figure in Christianity, and Muhammad the key in the Islam, Moses is the key to the Jewish faith.

Today’s segment of the Nativity has one purpose: to tie Jesus, who in Matthew’s eyes was the perfector of the Jewish faith, to Moses, the originator. With the slaughter of all the boy children, and the flight to and from Jesus, Matthew is clearly trying with these stories to firmly establish Jesus in his readers’ minds as the new Moses.

As we discussed at the beginning of this series, Matthew was writing to a specifically Jewish audience. Throughout his Gospel, we find fulfillments of Jewish prophecy, and references to the Hebrew Bible, and a focus on Jesus as the culmination of the Jewish faith. Matthew’s nativity is no different. We have already seen him tie Jesus to that other crucial Jewish figure, King David, by way of a genealogy and a purported birth in Bethlehem. Now, he is evoking the very formation of the Jewish nation, as he establishes where Jesus came from.

There are two elements to this story: Herod’s decree that all the male children in Israel be put to death, and Jesus’ family’s flight into Egypt as a result. Considering the situation we have established over the course of the last few blog posts, it is clear this is not a historical story again, and is instead a story meant to identify Jesus with the Jewish people.

If in fact Herod had ordered something as despicable and horrifying as the murder of all male children, we surely would have heard of it in contemporary writings. Yet neither Josephus, the premier Jewish historian of the time, nor the Romans, who sanctioned Herod’s rule and this were quite interested in his actions, ever mention such a thing. It is hard to imagine that if it had happened that no one would have mentioned it in any way.

So why did Matthew create such a story? He is clearly evoking the similar order by Pharaoh in Exodus to kill all the male Hebrew children.  Again, Matthew’s readers would have been well aware that no such thing really happened. Such an event would be burned into the collective consciousness of the Jewish community. The point is to reference Jesus as taking up Moses’ mantle as the guide and savior of the Jewish nation.

The flight to Egypt does the same, by giving Jesus a link to the land that Israel came up out of, while also providing an explanation for Jesus’ escape from the decree. At God’s prompting, through an angelic messenger, Joseph is warned to flee to Egypt to save his son. With his return, again at the command of an angel of God, Matthew is able to fulfill another Hebrew prophecy, recounted in verse 2:15: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” Just as God called Israel out of Egypt and into God’s protection, so Jesus was called. Jesus becomes a stand in for the entire nation.

The birth of a peasant boy in rural Galilee was an event of no special occasion. In a community that was largely illiterate, there would have been no time or energy wasted in remembering such details. The Nativity stories instead serve to orient Jesus as Matthew and Luke want him understood: as the Jewish messiah, as the bringer of a peaceful rule to God’s world. This was not history being written; it was myth pointing us towards Truth. As Tillich describes it,

Symbols of faith cannot be replaced by other symbols, such as artistic ones, and they cannot be removed by scientific criticism. They have a genuine standing in the human mind, just as science and art have. Their symbolic character is their truth and their power. Nothing less than symbols and myths can express our ultimate concern.