If you happen to be a schoolboy, a sailor, a thief, a pawnbroker or a victim of injustice today is your lucky day. 6 December is the feast of St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, who is the patron of all these as well as having assumed a very different mantle from his episcopal cope in his alias as Santa Claus.

Throughout Europe today, children will be enjoying the gifts left by the good saint in their shoes or other strategic places the night before (see postal stamp below from Ukraine from Wikimedia Commons), often after a rigorous catechism or the threat of receiving something less pleasant (a switch or a lump of coal) from his sidekick Black Peter, Krampus or a handy devil.

Those who bemoan the commercialisation of Christmas nowadays would have found a kindred spirit in the Czech author Karel Čapek, who in the 1930s was already observing that it was a long time since he had seen a ‘real’ St Nicholas rather than one parading a sandwich-board around the streets of Prague. ‘His devils are employees of the Baťa shoe firm, and yet another rival St. Nicholas is flaunting himself in the shop window of what I take it is the Moravia factory,’ he complains in his Kalendář  (Prague, 1940 ; British Library YF.2005.a.31518). He proposed the setting-up of a Central St Nicholas Bureau, where a first, second or third-class St. Nicholas could be ordered by telephone to enliven family festivities, with a real or a cotton-wool beard, according to price.

In the 19th century the gifts brought by the Saint were usually edible, especially gingerbread, as a whole chapter, ‘Saint Nicolas, pâtissier céleste’, describes in the exhibition catalogue Un Saint-Délice: pain d’épice et Nicolas published in 2002 by the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique (LF.31.b.3256). His festive activities have been the subject of countless songs, illustrations and even a psychological study by the Dutch author Pieter van der Ree in Sinterklaas en het geheim van de nacht [‘St Nicholas and the mystery of the night’] (Zeist, 2012; YF.2013.a.19234).

From earliest times legends clustered about the historical personage of St Nicholas (270-343), including his resurrection of three small boys pickled by an unscrupulous butcher, secret provision of dowries for three poor maidens, his rescue of seafarers in distress and men unjustly condemned, and his boxing the ears of the heretic Arius at the Council of Nicaea. In this centenary year, we may recall Benjamin Britten’s cantata St Nicholas (1948), which tunefully commemorates several of these.

On a more serious note, the British Library holds a volume dating from 1662 which was acquired by the British Museum before the end of 1834 from the collection of Thomas Smith. The Old Church Slavonic Sluzhby i zhitīe i chiudesa Nikolaa Chiudotvortsa [‘Services, life and miracles of St Nicholas the Wonderworker’] is thought to have been printed in Moscow, and testifies to the widespread devotion to one of the most attractive and popular Saints, loved and venerated in both the Eastern and Western traditions of Christianity. 

Sluzhby i zhitīe i chiudesa Nikolaa Chiudotvortsa ([Moscow], 1662). C.127.a.4(1)

It is especially appropriate, perhaps, as St. Nicholas is also the patron of students, to wish our readers happiness on his feast-day, and, as Karel Čapek concludes, ‘may gifts be yours in abundance’.

Susan Halstead,  Curator Czech/Slovak Studies