Father Christmas

The popular cultural representation of St. Nicholas as Father Christmas, though drawing on a number of such legends, was based primarily on the Dutch custom of giving children presents - slipping fruits, nuts, and little toys into shoes or stockings drying along the warm hearthside on his feast day, December 6 (that's today).

Throughout the rest of Europe during the Middle Ages, that day was marked by festively decrating homes and by a sumptuous feast that interrupted the general fasting of Advent. (I'm going to find some good recipes for us to have a feast today!)

In Scandinavia it was celebrated as a day of visitation, whe the elders of all the remote country churches would bundle themselves in their thick furs and drive their sleighs laden with gift pastries, through the snowy landscape to every home within the parish.

Kerry

Christian Homeschool Curriculum

St. Nicholas Legend

One legend tells of how a citizen of Patara lost his fortune and because he could not raise dowries for his three young daughters, he was going to give them over to prostitution. After hearing this, Nicholas took a small bag of gold and threw it through the window of the man's house on the eve of the Feast of Christ's Nativity. The eldest girl was married with it as her dowry. He performed the same gracious service for each of the other girls on each of the succeeding nights. The three purses, portrayed in art with the saint, were thought to be the origin of the pawnbroker's symbol of three gold balls. But they were also the inspiration for Christians to begin the habit of gift giving during each of the twelve days of Christmas - from December 25 until Epiphany on January 6.

Kerry

Homeschool Curriculum

Today is St. Nicholas Day

The fourth century pastor who inspired the tradition of Santa Claus may not have lived at the north pole or travled by reindeer and sleigh, but he certainly was a paradigm of graciousness, generosity and Christian charity. Early Byzantium histories reported that Nicholas suffered imprisonment and made a famous profession of faith during the persecution of Diocletian. He also was reportedly at the Council of Nicea, possibly slapping the heretic Arius. But, it was his love and care of children that gained him the greatest renown. He was a particular champion of the downtrodden, bestowing upon them gifts as tokens of the grace and mercy of the gospel.

In one legend, Nicholas saved several youngsters from certain death when he pulled them from a deep vat of vinegar brine, on the Feast of the Nativity. Ever afterward, Christians remembered the day by giving one another large crisp pickles.

Kerry

True Readers

In his wise and wonderful book An Experiment in Criticism C.S. Lewis said, “The majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called reading oneself to sleep. They sometimes combine it with desultory conversation; often, with listening to the radio. But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.”

Taken from George Grant's blog

Kerry
Classic Literature