Nicholas and the Three Bags of Gold

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It is the middle of the night, and it is very quiet.

A house on a narrow street, in a town by the sea. The shutters are half open, because it is warm, and because there is nothing inside worth stealing. A thin strip of moonlight lies across the floor. Somewhere a dog has an opinion about something, and then decides against it.

Then, out of the dark, something comes through the window.

It is not a bird. It is not a stone. It lands on the floor with a soft, heavy, unmistakable sound. A sort of chink-thump. The sound of a small cloth bag that is very, very full of something that is not lentils.

Inside the house, a man sits up in bed. His heart is pounding. He creeps to the window and looks out, and there is nobody there. Just the empty street, and the moon, and the dog, who is pretending none of this has anything to do with him.

The man picks up the bag. He opens it. And in the moonlight, something glints back at him. Gold.

He stands there in his nightshirt for a long time, holding it, not breathing.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is the old tale of Saint Nicholas and the three bags of gold, from the Life of Nicholas written by a Greek monk called Michael in the ninth century and retold all over Christendom ever since, and the daughters' names, their personalities, and most of the small conversations are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me take you to Lycia.

If you have a map of Turkey in your head, go to the bottom left-hand corner, where the land runs down into the Mediterranean in a tumble of mountains and little bays. That is Lycia. It is steep. It is beautiful. It smells of pine and salt and, in the summer, of goats who have been standing in the sun. The mountains come right down to the water, so that for much of history the easiest way to get from one Lycian town to the next was not to walk but to get in a boat and go round.

The Lycians were an old people, older than the Greeks and Romans who later ran the place, and they had a habit of carving their tombs into the cliffs above their towns. Not graves in a churchyard. Whole little houses, with columns and doorways and pointed roofs, cut straight into the rock face, high up, so that the dead could look down on the living and keep an eye on things. If you visit the town of Myra today, those tombs are still there, staring down at the tourists, slightly disapproving, like grandparents on a balcony.

By the time of our story, the early three hundreds, Lycia had been part of the Roman Empire for a long while. People spoke Greek. They went to the baths. They had a theatre at Myra, which you can still sit in, and which held about ten thousand people, which is more than most towns there could fill on a good night, so I like to imagine that every play was performed to a slightly echoey audience of four thousand people and some pigeons.

And Lycia sat right on the shipping lanes. This matters for our story, and it matters for Saint Paul, too. In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul stops at Patara, a Lycian port, and changes ships there. Years later, as a prisoner on his way to Rome, he comes to Myra, and there, Acts says, the centurion found a ship of Alexandria sailing for Italy, and put them aboard. A ship of Alexandria sailing for Italy was, almost certainly, a grain ship. Egypt grew the wheat. Rome, and later Constantinople, ate it. And the great fat grain ships, wallowing along with the wind, stopped at the Lycian harbours on the way. At Andriake, the port of Myra, there is still the shell of an enormous granary that the Emperor Hadrian built, long and stone and solid, like a cathedral for bread.

Hold on to the grain ships. They will come back.

Now, about money, and about marriage, because tonight's story is about both.

In the Roman world, when a daughter married, her family gave a dowry. This was not a quaint custom. It was the financial foundation of the whole new household. It was, roughly, the deposit on the house, the furniture, the starting fund, and the insurance policy, all rolled into one, and it often stayed tied to the wife, so that if things went badly, she was not left with nothing. A daughter with a good dowry could marry well. A daughter with a modest dowry could marry modestly. A daughter with no dowry at all was in a very difficult position indeed, because a respectable family would hesitate to take her, and there were not many other respectable paths open to a young woman with no money of her own.

So if you were a father in Lycia with daughters, you saved. You put things by. You worried. You probably lay awake at night doing sums. And if your fortunes collapsed, through a bad harvest, or a ship that went down, or a business partner who turned out to be an optimist, then your daughters' futures collapsed with them.

Hold on to that, too.

And now, a word of honesty, because it is part of the deal on this show. Saint Nicholas was a real person. He was the bishop of Myra, in the first half of the three hundreds, and his tomb at Myra was a place of pilgrimage very early on, with a church built over it. That much we can stand on. But almost everything else we know, or think we know, comes from lives written down centuries after he died, when his fame had already spread far and wide, and when, frankly, people had begun to tell a great many stories about him, some of which may even have belonged to another holy Nicholas from the same region, a couple of centuries later. So tonight I will tell you the old story as the old lives tell it, and I will tell you which bits are history and which bits are legend, and I will tell you which bits I made up. And if that sounds like a lot of labels, don't worry. You will not need to remember them. You only need to remember the gold.

According to the old lives, Nicholas was born in Patara, the same harbour town where Saint Paul once changed ships, to parents who were Christian, devout, and rather well off.

The lives then tell us a number of things about his babyhood which I am going to pass on to you, with the honest warning that they are the sort of thing that gets said about a saint's babyhood by people writing a long time later. For instance, the Golden Legend, written in Italy in the twelve hundreds, says that on his very first day, when they gave him his first bath, the newborn Nicholas stood up in the basin all by himself. And it says that as an infant, on Wednesdays and Fridays, which were fasting days, he would only feed once a day.

I would like to say, on behalf of every parent listening, that this is the single least relatable miracle in the whole of Christian tradition. A baby who voluntarily feeds less? On a schedule? Who asks for nothing in the night? The old writers clearly meant it as a sign of holiness from the very start. Any parent of an actual newborn will hear it as science fiction.

What the lives agree on, and what matters for us, is this. Nicholas grew up to be a serious, kind, devout young man. He went to church. He read the Scriptures. He was not, apparently, a party animal. And while he was still young, his parents died, and he inherited their money. All of it.

Now. There are two ways for a young man to react to a large inheritance, and you have probably met both. One is to say, at last, and buy a horse that is far too fast for him. The other is to sit very still and feel the weight of it.

Nicholas, the lives tell us, was the second sort. He believed, quite simply, that the money was not really his. It had been given to him, and so it was to be given on. He was not trying to be clever about it. He was just a young man who had read the Gospels and decided that they meant what they said.

So he looked at the money, and he asked God what to do with it.

And I imagine, though the old lives don't say so, that he also had a small problem. Because if you are known to be rich, and known to be kind, and known to be young, then word gets around. And people start turning up at your door. Some of them in real need. Some of them with a very moving story about a camel. And you begin to realise that giving money away well is actually quite hard.

There was one passage of Scripture, though, that Nicholas seems to have taken very much to heart. It is from the Sermon on the Mount, in the sixth chapter of Matthew's Gospel, and Jesus says something like this:

When you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you.

Which is a wonderful instruction, and also, if you think about it, a slightly funny one. Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Picture it. The right hand quietly slipping a coin into someone's pocket, while the left hand is busy pointing at a passing seagull to cause a distraction.

But the meaning is plain enough. Give, and don't make a show of it. Don't do it to be thanked. Don't do it so people will say, what a generous young man that Nicholas is. Do it so that the person is helped, and leave the rest to God.

And it was just around then that Nicholas heard about his neighbour.

The old lives tell us very little about the neighbour. He was a man of some standing who had fallen on hard times. He had three daughters, all of marriageable age. And he had no money left for their dowries. That is almost everything. The lives do not give his name, or what he did for a living, or how he lost his money. They do not name the daughters either.

Which, I have to say, I find a little sad. Because in my experience, three sisters who live in the same small house for twenty-odd years are never three copies of the same person. So for tonight, and only for tonight, and with a clear label saying that the sources do not name them, let me introduce you to the girls.

The eldest, I'll call Agathe. Agathe was the sensible one. She knew where everything was. She knew what everything cost. When the money began to run out, it was Agathe who quietly took over the household accounts, and Agathe who discovered that you can make a very respectable supper out of one onion, some lentils, and a firm refusal to discuss it.

The middle one, I'll call Irene, which means peace, which was ironic, because Irene was the dramatic one. Irene read poetry. Irene sighed at windows. Irene had, at various points in her life, been in love with a fisherman, a lyre player, and a young man she had seen exactly once across the marketplace and who, for all she knew, was already married to a perfectly nice woman in Telmessos.

And the youngest, I'll call Phoebe, which means bright, and she was. Phoebe was the one who asked questions. Phoebe was the one who listened at doors. If there was a mystery in the house, Phoebe would solve it, and then tell everyone, and then be sent to her room, and then solve another one through the floorboards. Remember Phoebe.

And their father. Their poor father. He was not a bad man. He was a proud man, and a frightened one, and those two things together can make a person very quiet. He had been somebody in that town. People had nodded to him in the street. And now his best cloak had gone, and then his second-best cloak had gone, and the slave who used to do the shopping had gone, and the good plates had gone, and he had begun to take the long way round to the market so as not to pass the houses of the men he used to dine with.

And every night he lay awake and did the sums, and every night the sums came out the same.

Three daughters. No dowries. No husbands. No future.

I should tell you, honestly, that the old life says the father, in his despair, was close to a terrible decision, one that would have put his daughters' honour and safety in real danger, simply to keep the family alive. It is a dark moment in the story, and the old writers did not hide it, because they wanted you to understand how near to the edge this family was. But it is bedtime, and we do not need to stand on that edge for long. It is enough to know that the father was afraid, that the girls' futures were in real peril, and that nobody in the town was doing anything about it.

Well. Almost nobody.

I imagine an evening in that house. The lamp is low, because oil costs money. Agathe is mending something that has already been mended twice. Irene is looking out of the window. Phoebe is looking at her father.

"Father," says Phoebe. "Are we poor now?"

"We are," says the father, "going through a period of adjustment."

"That means yes," says Agathe, without looking up.

"I knew it," says Irene, to the window. "I shall die unmarried. I shall grow old in this room. They'll find me in fifty years, a withered old woman, still holding a single dried rose."

"Where would you even get a rose," says Agathe.

"That's not the point," says Irene.

And the father puts his head in his hands, and doesn't say anything at all. And the three girls go quiet, because they love him, and because they can see that he is not adjusting very well.

Meanwhile, a few streets away, a young man has heard the gossip.

Because of course there was gossip. There always is. Somebody's cousin had heard from somebody's cook that the old man had sold the last of the silver. Somebody had seen him at the money-lender's. Somebody said that the eldest was already past the age when a girl ought to be married, and somebody else said it was a scandal, and somebody else said it was a shame, and everybody said they had always known it would come to this, which nobody had.

And the young man listened, and went home, and opened the chest where he kept his inheritance, and stood looking at it for a long time.

Here is the thing Nicholas had to solve.

He could have simply walked round to the house, in daylight, knocked on the door, and handed the father a bag of gold. That would have been generous, and quick, and nobody could have objected to it.

But think about it from the father's side. A proud man, who has been taking the long way round to the market so as not to be seen. And now a young neighbour, half his age, turns up at the door in broad daylight with a bag of money, while the whole street watches. The father would have had to say thank you. He would have had to be grateful, in public, for ever. Every time he saw Nicholas in the street, he would have had to nod in a particular way. And everybody would have known. The girls would have married as the daughters of the man who was rescued by charity.

Nicholas, I think, understood that. And he also understood that bit about the left hand and the right hand. So he came up with a plan.

He would give the money in secret. At night. Without a word. And nobody would ever know who it was from.

It is, if you think about it, a beautifully simple plan. It is also, if you think about it a bit more, a plan with one obvious flaw, which is that it depended on a young man creeping about a town at night with a bag of gold, which is exactly the sort of behaviour that gets a young man arrested. But Nicholas does not appear to have worried about that. Saints are often like this. They see the right thing to do, and the practical difficulties come as a surprise to them later.

So he counted out enough gold for one dowry. Enough for a decent marriage. Not a lavish one, not a royal one, but enough that a good family would be glad to say yes. He tied it up in a cloth bag. And he waited until it was dark.

I like to imagine him walking those few streets. The town asleep. His sandals as quiet as he could make them on the stones. Holding the bag tight against him so that it would not clink, which, as anyone who has ever tried to carry coins silently will know, is basically impossible. Every step: chink. Every step: chink. Nicholas, freezing in a doorway, sure that the whole town has heard. A cat, looking at him with deep contempt.

And then he reaches the house. And the window, because it is a warm night, is open.

He does not knock. He does not leave a note. He does not hang about to see what happens. He simply lifts the bag, takes aim, tosses it through the window, and walks away into the dark.

Chink-thump.

Which is where we came in.

Inside the house, the father wakes up. He finds the bag. He opens it, and sees the gold, and he stands there in his nightshirt in the moonlight, and he cannot believe it.

The old life says he wept. He wept, and he thanked God, and he could not imagine who had done it.

I would add that I imagine he also, at some point, very carefully checked whether he was asleep. And then sat down, quite suddenly, on the floor.

In the morning, of course, the girls find out. You cannot hide a bag of gold from a girl called Phoebe.

"Where did it come from?" says Phoebe.

"I don't know," says the father.

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"It came through the window."

"Things don't just come through windows," says Agathe.

"This one did," says the father.

Irene clasps her hands. "It's a sign," she says. "It's a secret admirer. Somebody has seen me across the marketplace, and been struck to the heart, and —"

"Somebody has seen you across the marketplace," says Agathe, "and been struck by an urge to pay for your eldest sister's wedding?"

There is a pause.

"It could be a very confusing admirer," says Irene.

But the father was not a fool, and he was not dishonest. He knew the gold was a gift, and he knew what it was for. It was for the eldest. So he did the sensible thing, and the sensible thing had a name, and it was Agathe.

And so, in the weeks that followed, a match was found for her. A good one. The old life simply says that the father arranged the marriage of his first daughter. In my version of the story, the young man was a quiet, steady fellow who made barrels, and who fell in love with Agathe the moment she corrected his arithmetic. They were very happy. Their barrels were, by all accounts, extremely well organised.

And all through that wedding, the father kept glancing at the faces of the guests. Wondering. Was it him? Was it her? Was it the old man in the corner who used to owe him money? Who had done this?

And nobody, it seemed, knew.

Now. You might think that one bag of gold would be the end of it. One daughter married, the household a little easier, the young man in the shadows having done his good deed.

But Nicholas had not set out to marry off one daughter. He had heard that there were three.

So, not long after, the old life tells us, he did it again.

Same street. Same night-time. Same open window, or at least, an open window; one does wonder, by this point, whether the father had stopped shutting it altogether, just in case. Same bag, or another very like it. Same aim, same throw, same soft heavy sound landing on the floor.

Chink-thump.

And this time, the father was awake almost before it landed. He was getting quite good at waking up. He rushed to the window. And once again, there was nobody there. Just the street, and the moon, and possibly that same cat, now looking at the whole situation with real professional interest.

The second bag was for the second daughter. That was obvious to everybody, even to Irene, who was briefly disappointed that there was no note, and then was very busy indeed.

Because Irene, it turned out, had something to tell her father. There was a young man. No, not the one from the marketplace. Not the lyre player either. This was a quite different young man, a perfectly ordinary and kind young man who lived two streets away, and had been bringing her family small presents of figs from his uncle's orchard for over a year now, and whom she had been far too busy being tragic to notice. And now she noticed. And now, thanks to a bag of gold through the window, she was allowed to.

I'd like to point out that the figs were also given quietly, without any fuss, by a young man who didn't need to be thanked. It seems to have been a good season in that town for that sort of thing.

But now the household had a problem, and the problem was curiosity.

Who was it?

The father became, for a while, a little bit obsessed. He would stand in the market and look hard at everybody who passed, as if a person who threw gold through windows might be recognised by the way they bought fish. He began to suspect people. The money-lender, perhaps, feeling guilty? A rich widow at the far end of the street? A long-lost cousin, coming back from Alexandria with a fortune and a sense of humour?

And Phoebe, who was now the only daughter left at home, had a plan. Phoebe always had a plan.

"There will be a third bag," she said.

"You don't know that," said her father.

"There are three of us," said Phoebe. "Two bags. Two weddings. One of me." She held up a single finger, just in case he had lost count.

"Perhaps," said the father, carefully, "whoever it is has run out of gold."

"Then he wouldn't have started," said Phoebe. "Nobody marries off two daughters out of three and then just stops. It would be rude."

Her father had to admit there was something in this.

"So when he comes," said Phoebe, "we'll be ready. We'll stay awake. We'll take it in turns. I'll do the first watch, and you do the second, and when he comes, we'll run out, and we'll catch him, and we'll find out who it is."

"And then what?" said her father.

And Phoebe opened her mouth, and then closed it again. Because she had not actually thought about what happens after you catch a person who is secretly being kind to you.

It is a good question, and a great many people never ask it.

But the father thought about it. He thought about it a great deal. And he decided that, whatever happened, if he ever met this person, he had to say thank you. Not in a polite, nodding, embarrassed way. Properly. He had spent months being ashamed, taking the long way round to market, hiding from the people who used to know him. And here was somebody who had not made him ashamed at all. Who had helped him without making him small. The father found that he very much wanted to look that person in the face.

And so they kept watch.

They kept watch for quite a long time, actually. That is the thing about keeping watch. The night you stay up is never the night it happens.

Phoebe did the first watch for the first three nights and fell asleep on the fourth, on the floor by the window, with her chin on her arms. The father did the second watch and found himself, at three in the morning, thinking about all sorts of things he had not let himself think about in years. His late wife. The day each of his daughters was born. The friends who had stopped visiting. The way the town looked from the hill above it, at dawn, in spring. It is strange what comes to a person who sits up in the dark, waiting for something good.

And then, one night, it came.

The old life tells it very simply. The father was on watch. He heard the sound of the bag landing. And this time, instead of creeping to the window, he ran out of the door, straight into the street, and after the figure he could just see hurrying away into the dark.

I like to think it was not a very dignified chase. A grown man, not as young as he used to be, in his nightclothes, pelting down a narrow street. A young man ahead of him, holding up the hem of his robe and trying to run on tiptoe, which does not really work. Phoebe, woken by the door banging, running after both of them in a blanket, shouting, "Father! Father, is it him? Is it a him?" The cat, keeping pace along the top of a wall, enjoying this enormously.

And at the end of the street, or round the next corner, the father caught up.

He grabbed the young man by the sleeve. And the young man turned round.

And the father saw who it was.

It was Nicholas. The quiet one. The one whose parents had died. The one who was always in church. The one the father had nodded to, vaguely, perhaps, in the old days, and not thought about since.

The old life says that the father fell at Nicholas's feet. He fell at his feet, and he wept, and he called him the one who had saved them, and he tried to kiss his feet, there in the dusty street, in the middle of the night.

And Nicholas, the life says, would not let him. He lifted him up.

And I imagine the conversation going something like this.

"Please," says Nicholas. "Please get up. You'll ruin your knees."

"You," says the father. "It was you. All three times. It was you."

"It was God," says Nicholas. "I just have quite a good throwing arm."

"But why? Why us? Why didn't you say?"

And Nicholas is quiet for a moment, and then he says, "Because it isn't mine. It never was. And because you have been carrying enough. I didn't want to give you one more thing to carry, even a debt of thanks."

The father doesn't know what to say to that. So he just holds on to the young man's sleeve.

"There's one thing I'd ask," says Nicholas. "Just one."

"Anything."

"Don't tell anyone. Please. Not while I live. Let it be between you, and me, and God."

And here we come to the part of the story that I love most of all. Because the father promised. He really did. The old life says that Nicholas made him promise not to reveal it, and he gave his word.

And then, at some point, obviously, somebody told.

Because we know the story. Every child in Europe knows the story. It is carved on churches, painted in icons, sung about in hymns, and printed on Christmas cards. The secret that Nicholas asked to keep is one of the least well kept secrets in the history of the human race.

Now, to be fair to the father, he only promised not to tell while Nicholas lived. So perhaps he kept his word to the letter, and only told the story afterwards, when it could do Nicholas no harm and might do others a lot of good. That would be the charitable reading, and I think we should give it to him. He had, after all, been on the receiving end of a great deal of charity, and some of it may have rubbed off.

But I also think, privately, that there was a girl called Phoebe standing at the corner of that street in a blanket, who had heard every word. And Phoebe was not, historically, a keeper of secrets.

Anyway. The third bag was for the third daughter. And in my version of the story, Phoebe married late, and well, a man who was almost as curious as she was, and they spent their whole lives together solving small mysteries around the town, mostly about who had taken whose donkey. And every year, on one particular night, she would leave the shutters open, just a little. Not for any reason. Just because.

And as for the gold. There is a lovely old tradition, which I give to you only as a tradition, that the three golden balls you sometimes see hanging outside pawnbrokers' shops are a memory of Nicholas's three bags of gold. Pawnbrokers, after all, are in the business of helping people through hard times, at least on a good day. Whether that is really where the sign came from, historians argue about. But I like the thought that, all over the world, there are still three golden somethings hanging in the street, quietly reminding people of a young man with a good throwing arm.

Now, what happened to Nicholas next?

According to the old lives, he went on giving. He gave his inheritance away until there was nothing left of it. He went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And then he came home to Lycia, to Myra, the big town along the coast, with the cliff tombs and the theatre and the harbour full of grain ships.

And there, the old story says, he became a bishop in a rather unexpected way.

The bishop of Myra had died, and the other bishops of the province had gathered to choose a new one, and they could not agree. This, I should point out, is not a legend. That is simply what happens when you put several bishops in a room. But then, the Golden Legend says, one of the oldest bishops had a dream in the night, telling him to go to the doors of the church early in the morning, and that the first man to come in, whose name was Nicholas, should be made bishop.

So the old bishop went and stood by the door before dawn, feeling, I imagine, slightly silly. And a young man came in early to pray, as he did every morning.

"Excuse me," said the old bishop. "What's your name?"

And the young man, who was very humble, and very surprised to be asked, said, "Nicholas, father. Your servant."

And before he knew what was happening, he was a bishop.

That story, I need to say clearly, is legend. The real Nicholas almost certainly became bishop in the ordinary way that bishops were chosen then, by the clergy and people and the neighbouring bishops. But I think the legend gets at something true, which is that he did not go looking for the job. The job came looking for him. And he seems, by all accounts, to have done it well.

The lives tell many stories of Bishop Nicholas, and I will give you just two of them, both of which are legends written down long afterwards, but both of which are lovely.

The first is about a storm. Sailors, out on the sea off Lycia, were caught in a terrible gale. Their mast was cracking, the sea was coming over the side, and they were sure they would drown. So they called on God, and on the bishop of Myra, whom they had heard about, to pray for them. And the old story says that the storm died down, and they came safely to port, and went straight up to the church to give thanks, and recognised the bishop there as the man they had seen, in their fear, standing among them on the deck. That is why sailors, all over the Mediterranean and beyond, have prayed to Saint Nicholas for centuries, and why there are churches of Saint Nicholas in harbour towns from Greece to Norway. It was always God who calmed the sea, the old writers knew that perfectly well. But sailors like to know that somebody is praying for them, and they decided that Nicholas was their man.

The second story is about the grain ships. Remember them?

There was a famine in Myra. The harvest had failed. People were hungry. And one day, the great grain ships from Alexandria came into the harbour at Andriake, on their way to the emperor's capital, so full of wheat they sat low in the water. And Bishop Nicholas went down to the harbour and asked the captains if they would give a hundred measures from each ship, for the hungry people of his city.

And the captains, quite reasonably, said no. Because the grain was the emperor's. It had been weighed when they loaded it in Egypt, and it would be weighed again when they unloaded it, and if any was missing, it would be their necks. You can understand their point of view. Imperial tax auditors were not famous for their sense of humour, then or now.

But Nicholas said, give it to me, and I promise you, by the grace of God, that when you get to the capital, you will not be found short.

And the old story says that the captains, somewhat nervously, did as he asked. And when they came to the capital, and the grain was weighed, it was exactly what it had been when they loaded it. Not a measure missing. And back in Myra, the grain the bishop had begged lasted the city through two whole years, with enough left over to sow the fields.

Again, that is a legend. But there is something rather beautiful in the fact that the people of Lycia, remembering their bishop, remembered him going down to the harbour to ask for bread for his people. Of all the things they could have said about him, they said: he fed us when we were hungry.

And now I must tell you one more story, with the biggest label of all.

There is a famous tale, much loved and much painted, that Nicholas went to the great Council of Nicaea, in the year three hundred and twenty-five, where the bishops of the whole Church gathered to settle the question raised by a priest called Arius about who Jesus is, and that during the debate, Nicholas became so upset by what Arius was saying that he got up, walked across the room, and slapped him.

Now. Here is the honest bit. That story does not appear in the early sources at all. It turns up centuries later. And Nicholas's name is not on the oldest surviving lists of the bishops who were at Nicaea. He may have been there, some later lists include him, but we simply cannot be sure. So the slap is, very much, a late legend.

And I have to say, if it did happen, it was not his finest hour. The legend itself seems to know this. It goes on to say that the other bishops were horrified, and Nicholas was stripped of the signs of his office and shut up for the night, and that he spent that night in prayer and sorrow, and that only in the morning was he forgiven and restored. Which is the legend's way of saying, quite clearly, that he was forgiven, not that he was right.

And I think there is a gentle lesson in it, which is this. Even the saints, in the stories we tell, sometimes lose their tempers. And even when you are quite sure you are right about something very important, slapping people is still not how arguments are meant to be settled. The council settled the question by meeting, praying, talking, and writing down the faith in words that Christians in both the East and the West still say on Sundays. Not with anyone's hand. So if Nicholas did lose his temper that day, it is good to know that he was sorry. And if he did not, then somebody, centuries later, made up a story to remind us that even very good people need forgiving now and then. Either way, it is not a bad thing to remember.

And there is something rather touching, too, in the fact that people who loved Nicholas told that story about him at all. They did not imagine their saint as a smiling statue who never felt anything. They imagined a man who cared so much that it got the better of him once. Then they had him say sorry, and they had him forgiven.

The old lives say that Nicholas lived a long time, and served his people at Myra for many years, and that he died there, peacefully, on the sixth of December. The exact year we do not know. It was somewhere around the middle of the three hundreds.

They buried him at Myra, and a church was built over his tomb, and people began to come. First from Lycia. Then from all over the Greek-speaking world. Then from much further away. Sailors came. Mothers came. Fathers who were worried about money came. Children came, holding their parents' hands, looking up at the painted walls.

For more than seven hundred years, he lay there, in Myra, by the sea, under the gaze of the old cliff tombs.

And then, in the year ten eighty-seven, when that part of the world was troubled and changing hands, sailors from the town of Bari, in the heel of Italy, came to Myra and took his relics away with them, across the sea, home to Bari. People in Myra were heartbroken. People in Bari were overjoyed. Historians are still a bit awkward about the whole thing. But the people of Bari built a great stone basilica for him, and he rests there still, and pilgrims come, from the West and from the East, Catholic and Orthodox, and kneel at the same tomb, and say their prayers to the same God. Which, all things considered, is a rather lovely thing for one small bishop to have managed.

His feast is the sixth of December, in both traditions. And the Orthodox also keep the ninth of May, for the day his relics came to Bari, and they keep it in Bari, too.

And his story travelled. Oh, how it travelled.

In the Low Countries, the people called him Sinterklaas, and on the eve of his feast, children would leave out their shoes, and in the morning find little gifts in them, given in secret, because that is what Saint Nicholas does. And when Dutch settlers crossed the Atlantic, Sinterklaas went with them. And in the new world, over a couple of centuries, with some help from writers and poets and, later, a great many advertisers, Sinterklaas turned slowly into Santa Claus. He moved to the North Pole. He acquired reindeer. He became considerably rounder. He swapped his bishop's mitre for a red hat with a bobble on it.

He would, I think, have been quite baffled by most of it. But I hope he would have recognised one thing. That the whole point of the thing, underneath the reindeer and the wrapping paper, is still a gift given at night, while the people you love are sleeping, by someone who does not stay to be thanked. That much he would know. That much is his.

There is a story still told in many families, that the third bag of gold did not go through the window at all, because the father had finally shut it, and so Nicholas climbed up and dropped it down the chimney, and it landed in a stocking hung up by the fire to dry. That bit is very late folklore indeed. But you can see how it happened.

And if you ever go to Demre, which is what Myra is called now, you can still visit the old church of Saint Nicholas, half sunk below the level of the modern town, with its worn floors and faded paintings. The tomb is empty now. But the sea is still there, and the harbour, and the cliffs with the old tombs looking down. And on a warm night, if you walk the narrow streets, the shutters are still open. Just a little.

The sea comes in. The sea goes out.

And somewhere, someone is giving something away, and not telling anyone.

Some notes for the curious.

Saint Nicholas was a real bishop of Myra, in Lycia, in the fourth century, and his tomb there drew pilgrims from early on. Beyond that, nearly everything comes from later writing. The fullest early Greek life is by Michael the Archimandrite, written in the ninth century, around five hundred years after Nicholas died. It tells the story of the three bags of gold, the storm, and the grain ships at Myra. The Golden Legend, a much-loved collection of saints' lives put together in Italy in the twelve hundreds by Jacobus de Voragine, tells the same stories, and adds the newborn standing in his bath and the dream that made him bishop. Some of the tales may also have drifted over from a later Lycian saint, Nicholas of Sion, who lived in the five hundreds.

The story of Nicholas striking Arius at Nicaea is a late legend, and he is not on the oldest lists of Nicaea's bishops. The stocking and the chimney are later folk embroidery. The link between the three bags and the pawnbroker's sign is a tradition, and not a certain one.

What we invented tonight: the daughters' names, Agathe, Irene and Phoebe, and their personalities, the barrel maker and the young man with the figs, the cat, the chase in nightclothes, and nearly all the conversations. The old life gives none of that. It gives only a father, three daughters, three bags, a promise, and a young man who did not want to be thanked.

If you would like to read more, Charles Jones's book Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan, and Adam English's The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus, are both careful and readable.

That's the story of Saint Nicholas of Myra for tonight. His feast is the sixth of December, in both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and the Orthodox also remember him on the ninth of May, for the bringing of his relics to Bari. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

Here is a short prayer, a simple English version of the old hymn that the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches sing to him, gently smoothed for bedtime.

Your life showed you to your flock as a rule of faith, an image of gentleness, and a teacher of self-control. And so, by humility, you were raised up, and by poverty, you were made rich. Holy father Nicholas, pray to Christ our God, that our souls may be saved.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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