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St. Nicholas was a 4^th century bishop of an ancient Greek town called Myra in present-day Turkey. His parents died when he was a teenager, leaving him with considerable wealth. He was taken in by his uncle who was a priest.

St. Nicholas followed his uncle into the priesthood and spent his adult life helping the poor. The most well-known story about his compassion for others is of his hearing about a poor man in town with no money for a dowry for his daughters. No dowry had serious consequences. No marriage for the daughters meant they would likely be sold into a life of servitude.

Nicholas was so moved by this family’s circumstances that he secretly tossed a bag of gold into the girls’ stockings hanging by the fire place on three separate occasions, providing each of them with a dowry.

On the third night, the father caught Nicholas delivering the gold. Nicholas pleaded with the father not to tell anyone about what he had done.

St. Nicholas was a real, historical figure whose story was enhanced by tales of his many deeds of generosity that made him revered among the masses. Soon after he died on December 6, 348 c.e., the Festival of St. Nicholas was started to remember and celebrate his life of good deeds. Today the Festival is still celebrated annually in Western Europe on December 6. 

When Dutch settlers founded the colony of New Amsterdam that is today’s New York, they continued the observance of the Festival of St. Nicholas, only in Dutch his name was Sintaklaus, which eventually became the anglicized Santa Claus.  

On December 23, 1823, a poem was published anonymously in The Sentinel, the local paper of Troy, New York, that changed everything about Christmas in America.

St. Nicholas became Santa Claus, a jolly round fella who drove a sleigh of eight reindeer that landed on roof tops, climbing in and out chimneys across the land leaving presents and toys for children.

Thirteen years after “Twas The Night Before Christmas” was first published, Clement Clark Moore acknowledged he was the author, but in later years that has been questioned with some people suggesting the true author was a New York writer named Henry Livingston.

None of this, of course, has much to do with Christmas being the celebration of the birth of Jesus. What is more, it is unlikely that December 25th was the actual date of the birth of Jesus. What we do know is that Christmas, literally, “the Christ Mass,” was first celebrated on December 25 by the church in Rome in the 4^th century during the reign of the Emperor Constantine.

The Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on January 6 based on the Julian calendar that pre-dates the Gregorian calendar used in the West, and is also tied to what is called the Adoration of the Magi or the coming of the Wise Men to Bethlehem.

Whatever the actual reasons and dates for the church celebrating of Christmas, the purpose was and remains the proclamation of the message of love, hope, joy, and “peace  on earth, good will to all,” as Luke’s version of the birth of Jesus says (2:14).

Honestly, though, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of love, hope, joy, and peace in the world at the moment, and certainly not here in the United States.

But Christmas will be celebrated in spite of that fact, and perhaps will serve once again as a reminder that hatred, hopelessness, cynicism, and conflict are never the last word.

In that spirit I want to close as I have done before in my Christmas blog with the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914 as told by Jon Mitimore in Fee Stories.

“The British cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather was one of many who chronicled the event,” writes Mitimore.

“A machine gunner in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Bairnsfather was shivering in the muck of a three-foot trench on a cold night, munching on stale biscuits and chain-smoking, when he heard a noise at about 10 p.m.

“‘I listened,’ he recalled. ‘Away across the field, among the dark shadows beyond, I could hear the murmur of voices.’ He turned to a fellow soldier in his trench and said, ‘Do you hear the Boches [Germans] kicking up that racket over there?’ ‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘They’ve been at it some time!’ 

“The Germans were singing carols, as it was Christmas Eve. In the darkness, some of the British soldiers began to sing back. ‘Suddenly,’ Bairnsfather recalled, ‘we heard a confused shouting from the other side.’

“’We all stopped to listen. The shout came again. The voice was from an enemy soldier, speaking in English with a strong German accent. He was saying, ‘Come over here.’

“After some back and forth talk, British troops laid down their weapons, climbed out of their trenches, crossed the barbed wire, and joined the Germans. They traded handshakes and songs; they chewed tobacco and drank wine and laughed together—these men who earlier that day had been doing their best to kill each other.

“Some accounts describe German and British soldiers playing ‘football’ (soccer) on makeshift fields. Others mention British soldiers setting up barbershops and offering haircuts in exchange for cigarettes. The one thing all the accounts have in common is a general feeling of merriment among the soldiers.

“‘There was not an atom of hate on either side,’ Bairnsfather recalled.”

That is my Christmas wish for all of you, and for our country and the world we all inhabit together, a Christmas truce from everything negative, everything hateful, everything hurtful, everything threatening, in order to celebrate if only for a while the love, hope, joy, and peace that remind us of how precious life actually is.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!