Here is Saint Nicholas, ‘of this church the patron’ according to the Latin inscription at the foot of the window. The saint is holding a model of ‘this church’, Saint Nicholas’ at Barfrestone near Dover in Kent, a tiny gem of the 11th or 12th Century.
Notice, too, his impressive beard, as good as any department store Santa, who of course is a distant descendant of the generous Saint Nicholas.
The three discs repeated on his mitre (or bishop’s headdress) and his cope (or robe) stand for gold coins which Nicholas tossed into the chimney of a home where three daughters were too poor to get married. The story of the boys in the tub tells that the saint restored them to life after a butcher had killed and pickled them.
These stories are not to be believed as historically factual but they show that Nicholas was a conscientious bishop and well aware of the needs of children and families, a fitting patron of children. But do we want children to believe in Father Christmas? A man who comes down the chimney with presents for reportedly ‘good children’?
GK Chesterton explored this question in a 1935 article for the National Catholic Reporter, ‘Santa Claus and Science: On imagination, faith, and the natural fancy of children’. Here is an extract; read the whole essay by following the link below.
What do our great modern educationists, our great modern psychologists, our great makers of a new world, mean to do about the breach between the imagination and the reason, if only in the passage from the infant to the man? Is the child to live in a world that is entirely fanciful and then find suddenly that it is entirely false? Or is the child to be forbidden all forms of fancy; or in other words, forbidden to be a child? Or is he, as we say, to have some harmless borderland of fancy in childhood, which is still a part of the land in which he will live; in terra viventium, in the land of living men? Cannot the child pass from a child’s natural fancy to a man’s normal faith in Holy Nicholas of the Children, without enduring that bitter break and abrupt disappointment which now marks the passage of a child from a land of make-believe to a world of no belief.
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