The Magic and Mystery of Saint Nicholas
I remember a particularly extraordinary December 6th morning of my childhood as though it were just yesterday.
I was five years old.
Our beloved German housekeeper, Margaret, was getting my brother and sister and me ready to go out for the day, but was delayed because she couldn’t seem to find any of our shoes. Anywhere.
After searching our small apartment, she announced that we would just have to leave without our shoes.
Well, as a five-year-old child, this was of course all very dramatic. First, the mystery of where our shoes could have disappeared to. Then, the very idea of going out in the wintertime without shoes on.
But as we opened the door to leave, we looked down, and there were our three pairs of shoes, each with a tissue-wrapped parcel tucked inside, tied up with shiny, red ribbon.
Overwhelmed with curiosity, we sat right down on the floor and excitedly unwrapped our little parcels. To our delight, they were filled with tiny gold-wrapped chocolate coins and white powdered pfeffernüsse cookies.
Margaret clapped her hands to her face and exclaimed, “Oh, mein! Es war Sankt Nikolaus!”
Well, I wasn’t sure who this “Sankt Nikolaus” was, but I knew magic when I saw it.
I was captivated, completely entranced by this mysterious, mischievous Someone who had so cleverly and delightfully disrupted our household’s morning, leaving sweet and unusual treats in his wake.
For days afterwards, I peppered Margaret with fervent questions about this wonderful new stranger in our lives.
Drawing me close, and in hushed whispers, Margaret told me that Saint Nicholas was an important man of God. She showed me storybook pictures of Nicholas in his tall bishop’s miter. She said he secretly leaves coins and treats in children’s shoes, and in their stockings hung out to dry on clotheslines.
Margaret then told me that actually I already knew of this Nicholas — that in many countries, Saint Nicholas’ name was pronounced Sank NI’ Kloss, but that in my country, we called him SAN’ ta Kloss.
Santa Claus? …
I wondered how this could be.
The mysterious Saint Nicholas I had just experienced seemed to me somehow more intriguing, and possibly even a bit more magnanimous, than the December 24th sleigh-riding Santa Claus who I secretly feared might someday make good on the option of giving me coal if I were naughty, not nice.
But Margaret assured me that Saint Nicholas loves all children, and that he always cares for them. She told me, with great gentleness, that in fact, the kind and generous spirit of Saint Nicholas lives in the heart of all people.
She said this inside spirit of Nicholas teaches us to give to others in the way that he gives – quietly, full of love, and sometimes in ways we don’t always see.
I've come to realize that Margaret was describing what I now understand God to be.
The five-year-old me was enthralled, imagining the spirit of Saint Nicholas living inside of me, in all of his magic.
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Epilogue
It is clear to me now that there was even more grace than meets the eye in the delightful tissue-wrapped parcel I opened that early December morning. As a mother now myself, the gift of knowing who Saint Nicholas was and is, as told through Margaret’s words, has helped me to see what the current-day Santa Claus is meant to be — what we are all perhaps meant to be.
Ushering in the Advent season every year as he does, Saint Nicholas can orient us in a kind of counter-cultural way toward the true spirit of the Advent season, buffering us a bit from its consuming busy-ness.
We can feel Nicholas’ call to us in these early days of December to slow down and notice him, right here in our very midst, in all of his guises — quiet deliverers of Love, laden with small parcels of kindness and hushed grace, giving without recognition, even to (or especially to) complete strangers in need.
We can even feel Nicholas’ call to BE him.
From their earliest years, my daughters heard through me the reverent and hushed whispers of Margaret telling the story of the mysterious and loving Saint Nicholas and the power of his giving spirit.
Every year on the night of December 5th, they would put their shoes outside on the front stoop in delighted anticipation of tiny tissue-wrapped parcels being tucked inside the next morning.
That all of this is somehow “real” has been a given, all along. My girls and I never had “that talk about Santa Claus” that many parents dread. It just never felt right.
Because somehow, in ways that we may never understand, Saint Nicholas was, is, and will be — always.
We all have come to know this.
Like the story of when Carl Jung was asked the question, “Do you believe?” —
and Jung responded,
“No, I do not believe. I know.”
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photo credit: Tim Widing from the St. Nicholas Center Collection, found at www.stnicholascenter.org — a beautiful site devoted to the education and celebration of the tradition of Saint Nicholas.
