St. Nicholas of Myra

Nicholas was bishop of Myra, a port on the southern shore of modern Turkey, during the fourth century. That is very nearly all we know for certain. Nothing he wrote survives, and neither does anything written by people who knew him.

What we do have is the devotion, and it is early and solid. His tomb in Myra became a place of prayer and pilgrimage. In the sixth century the emperor Justinian built a church for him in Constantinople, and the liturgy ascribed to St. John Chrysostom named him. Few saints of any century have been loved so widely.

The stories came later. The first full account of his life, by a Greek monk who was an archimandrite, the head of a monastery, was written around 700 or in the early 800s (scholars disagree), three to five centuries after him. It is where the best-known story first appears: a ruined neighbor of the young Nicholas, three daughters with no dowry, and a bag of gold tossed through the window after dark, on three separate nights, so the girls would not be sold. On the third night the father caught him and Nicholas made him promise to tell no one.

The same Life tells other stories too, of three innocent men saved from the executioner and of sailors brought through a storm at sea. It also names Patara, a nearby port, as his birthplace, and later tradition adds that he was jailed under Diocletian. Other famous tales, such as the boys in the pickling tub or Nicholas striking Arius at Nicaea, appear many centuries later, and the sections below show when.

He was not a martyr. He died in Myra on a December 6, in a year no one knows, and his feast is still kept on that day. In 1087 sailors from Bari carried his bones to Italy, where they rest today.

Every one of the old stories about Nicholas has the same shape. Someone is about to be lost, three girls to be sold, a prisoner to the sword, a ship to the sea, and a bishop steps in. Whatever is legend in them, the Church has kept the picture for sixteen hundred years because it is the picture of a shepherd.

The dowry story also carries a lesson families can use in December. He gave at night, through a window, and asked the father to keep it quiet. That is the Gospel put into practice: “But when thou dost alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doth” (Matthew 6:3).

His day sits early in Advent, weeks before Christmas, and that may be its best gift. A small surprise in a shoe on December 6 lets children taste what it is to give and to be given something, while Christmas Day stays what it is: the birth of Christ.

This is a family prayer, written for this page. Pray it on the evening of December 5, when the shoes go by the door, or on the morning of December 6, before anyone looks inside them. One parent can lead and everyone can answer the last line together: St. Nicholas, pray for us.

It asks God for what Nicholas is remembered for, and asks Nicholas to pray with us. Small children can say just the last line. Older ones can name one person they would like to help in secret before Christmas.

There is no single official novena to St. Nicholas. A family that wants nine days can pray the prayer on this page each night from November 27 to December 5, the eve of his feast and the night the shoes go out.

In 2026 those nine days begin the day after Thanksgiving and run through Advent’s first week. If you miss a night, pick it up the next evening rather than starting over.

He was real. But almost everything people know about him comes from stories written long after he died, and it helps to know which is which. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 says plainly that “there is scarcely anything historically certain about him except that he was Bishop of Myra in the fourth century.” The Roman Martyrology, the Church’s book of the saints for each day of the year, remembers him on December 6 as bishop of Myra in Lycia, renowned for his holiness and for his intercession before the throne of grace.

What is history. A bishop named Nicholas led the church at Myra during the fourth century. His tomb there became a place of pilgrimage. By the sixth century the emperor Justinian had built a church for him in Constantinople, and his name was in the liturgy of the Eastern Churches. In 1087 his relics were carried from Myra to Bari, which we know from accounts written within a few years of it.

What is legend, and how old it is:

• The three daughters’ dowries. First written down in the oldest Greek Life of Nicholas, by an archimandrite (the head of a monastery), around 700 or in the early 800s. Historians still argue over whether a real memory lies behind it.
• The three condemned men. Among the oldest stories of all. The Life says its readers already knew it from an earlier account.
• Storms at sea. In the same Life: sailors who called on him and were brought safely to port.
• Nicholas at the Council of Nicaea. Uncertain. Most surviving copies of the list of bishops at the council in 325 leave him out, and the Catholic Encyclopedia doubted he was there. A few copies name him, one of them in a church history of the early sixth century, but scholars disagree over whether his name there is original or a later addition.
• Striking Arius at the Council. Legend, and a late one. The scholar Roger Pearse, following Gustav Anrich’s edition of the sources, found no text before the late fourteenth century, and that first version speaks only of “a certain Arian.” Arius himself is first named in a text of the sixteenth century.
• The boys in the pickling tub. Legend, and Western. No Greek source tells it. It first appears by about 1100, in Latin hymns and a Latin play that seems to come from Hildesheim in Germany, and in the French verse Life by Wace a few decades later. Three students murdered by an innkeeper become, in later versions, three little children and a butcher.

Because of the stories. The three daughters saved from being sold, the boys raised from the tub, and a Byzantine tale of a boy carried off by pirates and brought home on Nicholas’s feast all made him the saint parents asked to watch over their children. In the Middle Ages schoolboys took him as their own and kept his day with songs and plays, and in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland he became the secret bringer of gifts to children on his feast. The page on the patron saint of children has more.

The sailors came first in time. Myra was a port, its bishop lived among seafaring people, and the stories of ships saved in a storm traveled with the ships. Harbor churches named for him rose in port after port, first in the Mediterranean and later in the north; the page on the patron saint of sailors tells his story at sea.

The Catholic Encyclopedia adds merchants, bakers and travelers to his care, and names places from Greece and Russia to Lorraine, Sicily and Moscow that claim him as patron. His symbols in art are three gold balls or purses, for the dowries, and a bishop’s miter and staff.

By a long road, and most of it ran through New York. In much of Europe, Nicholas kept his place as the bishop who brings small gifts to children on December 6: Sinterklaas in the Netherlands and Belgium, Sankt Nikolaus in Germany and Austria. Reformers, Protestant and Catholic alike, tried to put an end to his customs, with little lasting success outside England, and families on the continent went on filling shoes on his night.

It is often said that the Dutch brought him to New Amsterdam. Historians have found little evidence of it. What we can trace is a group of New Yorkers after the Revolution who wanted a patron for their city:

• 1809: Washington Irving’s comic History of New York gives the city a pipe-smoking, jolly St. Nicholas who comes down chimneys.
• 1810: John Pintard, founder of the New-York Historical Society, has the first American picture of him made for a December 6 dinner, with stockings at the fireplace.
• 1821: a children’s book calls him “Sante Claus” and moves him to Christmas Eve, with a sleigh and a reindeer.
• 1823: the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” better known as “The Night Before Christmas,” fixes the round little gift-bringer in American homes.
• 1863 to 1886: Thomas Nast draws him every year for Harper’s Weekly, white beard, fur and all.

Through the 1920s, magazine illustrators settled on a life-size Santa in a red suit, so he was already familiar when Coca-Cola’s famous ads began in 1931. The name followed the same road: “Santa Claus” grew out of the Dutch and German forms of Saint Nicholas through New York spellings like “Sancte Claus” and “Sante Claus.”

The customs vary from country to country and from family to family. These are the ones families most often ask about:

• Shoes by the door. On the evening of December 5, the eve of his feast, children set out a shoe or a boot, cleaned and polished, by the door, the fireplace or the bed. In the morning it holds small treats. In many tellings the gold of the dowry story landed in stockings or shoes drying by the fire, which is where the custom is said to come from.
• Gold coins and oranges. Gold-foil chocolate coins, and an orange or a tangerine, stand for the bags or balls of gold he gave away. Nuts, apples, cookies, a holy card or a small book often join them.
• Something for the horse. Dutch children leave a carrot or a little hay in the shoe for Sinterklaas’s horse, hoping it will be traded for sweets.
• A visit from the bishop. In some parishes and schools, someone dressed as St. Nicholas comes in a bishop’s miter and cope, carrying a crozier, to ask the children about their year and hand out small gifts. He is a bishop, not Santa, and the children can tell the difference.

In 2026, Advent begins on Sunday, November 29, so December 6 is the Second Sunday of Advent. That matters for the Mass. St. Nicholas has an optional memorial on the general Roman calendar, and the Church’s Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year and the Calendar rank the Sundays of Advent among the highest days of the year, above every solemnity of a saint (no. 5 and the Table of Liturgical Days). A memorial is folded into the celebration of a weekday (no. 14), and when two celebrations fall on one day the higher in the Table is kept (no. 60), so the memorial gives way to the Sunday. The U.S. bishops’ liturgical calendar lists December 6, 2026, simply as the Second Sunday of Advent, with no mention of St. Nicholas.

So at Mass that day you will hear the Sunday readings, not those of St. Nicholas: Isaiah 40, the Second Letter of Peter, and the Gospel of John the Baptist crying in the desert (Mark 1:1–8). Isaiah’s words fit the bishop of Myra well: “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather together the lambs with his arm” (Isaiah 40:11).

At home, nothing changes. The shoes go out on Saturday night, December 5, and the feast is kept at breakfast on Sunday, before or after Mass. The second candle of the Advent wreath is lit the same day.

The best way to honor Nicholas is to do what he did. Jesus said it first: “That thy alms may be in secret, and thy Father who seeth in secret will repay thee” (Matthew 6:4). A few ways families do it:

• Give one gift in secret. Let each child choose someone (a grandparent, a neighbor, a lonely classmate) and leave something on their doorstep without a name.
• Fill a shoe for someone else. Some families fill one extra shoe with food or warm socks for a parish pantry or a shelter.
• Tell the true story. Read the dowry story at breakfast, and, as the children grow, help them see which parts are history and which are the stories people loved to tell.
• Pray together. The family prayer above fits the evening the shoes go out. The blessing below fits the moment you set them down.

For about seven hundred and fifty years his body lay in its tomb in Myra. In the spring of 1087, with Turkish forces advancing across Asia Minor, sixty-two sailors and merchants from Bari, sailing home from Antioch on three ships, landed near Myra, forced the monks who guarded the tomb to show it to them, and carried the bones away. They reached Bari on Sunday, May 9, 1087. The basilica’s own history does not hide that the monks were made to talk at sword point.

On October 1, 1089, Pope Urban II placed the relics under the altar in the crypt of the new church, the Basilica of San Nicola, where they rest today. Since 1951 the basilica has been in the care of the Dominicans. Bari keeps May 9 every year as the day his relics came home to the city, the Translation, and so do Orthodox Christians of the Russian tradition.

A clear liquid collects in the tomb, as it did at Myra; it is called the manna of St. Nicholas. It is drawn out once a year, on the evening of May 9. The basilica treats it with care: it is a relic, since it has touched his bones, and many people say it has comforted them, but the friars neither push it nor promise anything from it.

In the Eastern Churches, Catholic and Orthodox, few saints are loved more. His feast there is a great one, and the Byzantine calendar gives him his full title: our holy father Nicholas, archbishop of Myra in Lycia, the Wonderworker. After Prince Vladimir of Kyiv was baptized, his stories traveled north, and in Russia he became the best loved of saints; his icon hangs in Orthodox churches and homes all over the world.

Churches that follow the old Julian calendar keep his feast on December 6 by that calendar, which is December 19 on ours. Greece and Russia both count him a patron of the whole nation. Whatever calendar they follow, Catholics and Orthodox are honoring the same bishop of Myra.