When I was growing up, St. Nicholas Day was a much-anticipated milestone on the long road to Christmas Day. Our celebration was simple: We would leave our shoes outside the front door and would find them later that evening filled with treats—a couple of chocolates, an orange, a quarter, maybe a toy, and a progress report from Santa on how we were doing on the naughty/nice thing.
This was very much my father’s doing. American families in South Bend, Indiana, in the 1960s and 1970s did not celebrate St. Nicholas Day, although it’s possible that Dad’s family celebrated it when he was growing up (he was the grandson of German immigrants and grew up in a heavily immigrant section of Chicago). I don’t remember him talking about that, though, so it’s possible that he just read about it somewhere and decided to do it. My father loved holidays and special days—on our birthdays, he would make a treasure hunt, complete with rhyming clues, cartoons of pirates, and trails of paper footprints, to lead us to our gifts. St. Nicholas Day was right up his alley.
Of course we continued the tradition with our children. As they got older, the challenge was for “St. Nick” to sneak out of the house, fill the shoes, ring the bell, and dash in without getting caught.
St. Nicholas was the Bishop of Myra, and December 6 is actually the date of his death, which doesn’t seem very festive. There are a number of legends about him that are entertaining, despite a strong whiff of apocrypha. History Today has a nice short article about him, illustrated by this triptych by R. Fresson that sums it up nicely:
However, my favorite bit of St. Nicholas imagery is this painting by Jan Steen, which tells a number of little stories. My favorite is the boy who is crying because his shoe is empty. His grandmother, in the background, is gesturing to a curtain, and we know she has something tucked away for him. That’s why we love grandmas! This painting has a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to it, and I highly recommend checking it out for a detailed look at this detailed painting.
Happy St. Nicholas Day!