St. Nicholas of Myra (c. 270-343)

Bishop of Myra in Lycia in the fourth century, imprisoned under Diocletian and freed under Constantine, and after the Mother of God perhaps the most widely loved saint in the Christian world. The stories told of him are about justice before they are about miracles: the gold thrown by night through the window of a ruined man so that his three daughters would not be sold, and the three innocent men he took down from the executioner’s block by seizing the sword. Tradition places him at Nicaea and has him strike Arius; the oldest lists of the bishops there do not name him, and the Church sings it anyway, as a story about what the truth is worth. His relics were carried off to Bari in 1087, and the day is kept. The western Santa Claus is his distant descendant. Feast: December 6.