Читать книгу Bible Nuts and Bolts: Key Bible Topics Simply Explained - Brian Bailie - Страница 9

I hate to burst your bubble, but Santa Claus doesn’t have anything to do with the Christmas story.

Before I start the real Christmas story, let me explain who Santa Claus was.

Santa Claus is a translation of the name Saint [Santa] Nicholas [Claus].

Nicholas was a Christian who was born over 200 years after the birth of Jesus Christ.

Nicholas didn’t keep pet reindeers or live at the North Pole; in truth, Nicholas lived in an area that is near the Mediterranean south coast of modern-day Turkey.

As an active Christian and an important person in the church, Nicholas helped lots of people; but the good deed he is best remembered for is the help he provided to a poor man who had three daughters.

Apparently this man was so poor that he couldn’t afford to provide a dowry for his daughters, (a dowry is property or money that a bride brings into her marriage), and this meant that his daughters could never get married. In the culture of those times an unmarried woman had a very bad reputation - his daughters would be ruined.

Nicholas resolved to help the poor man; but it would have been humiliating for him if Nicholas simply gave him a bag of money; so Nicholas cleverly filled three purses with gold coins, one for each daughter, and secretly dropped the purses down the poor man’s chimney late at night when the fire was out and everyone was asleep.

However, so the story goes, the poor man had hung up his stockings to dry over the warm embers of the fire, and when Nicholas dropped the purses down the chimney, the purses landed inside the stockings.

You can see how this story about Nicholas has been elaborated to make it look like Santa Claus comes down the chimney and fills your Christmas stocking.

Unfortunately, despite the good Christian legacy of Nicholas, his modern representation as Santa Claus has nothing to do with Biblical teaching, and everything to do with the worldly exploitation of Christmas with modern sales and marketing techniques.