Santa Claus vs. Artemis: A Christmas Story

As we deck the halls with boughs of holly this year, read the story of Christ’s Nativity, sing hymns and carols, exchange gifts, and light our homes in increasingly irrational competition verging on mutually assured destruction with our neighbors, we must not lose sight of the real “reason for the season”: Santa’s victory over the pagan goddess Artemis. Really. Just to be clear, I am aware that Jesus is what Christmas is all about. It’s his birthday, after all, and Christians dated our Lord’s birth from the Virgin Mary to December 25 as a by-product of calculations of the date of his death and resurrection, dating long before the Christianization of ancient Rome. Today, however, like it or not, Santa Claus is just as much a part of the season as Jesus. The good news is that he is real—and a Christian! In particular, he was bishop of Myra in Lycia in Asia Minor in the fourth century. “Santa Claus,” after all, is just a weird, telephone-game distortion of “Saint Nicholas.” But who was Nicholas? Most people have heard one or both of the following stories.