The bishop's carol

Today is the feast day of Saint Nicholas, the Fourth Century Bishop of Myra who is the patron of Russia, Greece, children, sailors, unmarried women, merchants, pawnbrokers and charitable organizations. Nick has a lot on his plate.

He’s also the progenitor of Santa Claus (via the Dutch Sinterklaas and the story of the bishop lobbing bags of gold through a window and to land in shoes left by the fire, thus providing doweries for three impoverished girls).

We in the US envision Saint Nicholas/Santa Claus as a fat white bearded dude wearing a white fur-trimmed big red suit, mostly on account of Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. In other places he looks more clerical, travels with a single donkey instead of eight reindeer, and is accompanied by a dark-skinned dude named Zwart Piet (or sometimes, Krampus). The sidekick dishes out coal to children who’ve been naughty, while Nick leaves gifts for the good kids.

One recent alteration in Santa came from Tim Burton’s 1993 film, The Nightmare before Christmas. This happens when the chief of Halloweentown, Jack Skellington, tries to fulfil the duties of the man he refers to as Sandy Claws from Christmastown, makes a mess of things and has to scramble to put it all right. Right after Thanksgiving, my Halloween-spider neighbors took down their web and stalky-eyed monster and put up Christmas lights. Not unsurprisingly, their display had Jack/Sandy and an assistant:

Sadly, within a couple of days of that going up, the Tim Burton additions disappeared; I’m thinking they were stolen, which is pretty Grinchy, if you ask me.

But back to our actual saint—in addition to Russia and Greece, he’s kind of a big deal in Romania, and here’s “Colindul Sf. Ier. Nicolae”—“The Carol of Saint Nicholas”, sung by the nuns of the Buna-Vestire monastery (or maybe convent) in Călărași.