8 Fascinating But Not-So-Jolly Legends About St. Nicholas

It is hard to imagine the cheery, plump version of Santa Claus emerged from Saint Nicholas, the 4th century Bishop of Myra who, as a nursing infant, fasted on holy days and whose bones were stolen after his death. 

Instead of a “right jolly old elf,” St. Nicholas is the patron saint of everything from brewers to pawnbrokers to murderers. Here are eight often terrifying legends associated with the saint that seem more like a script from Dexter or Game of Thrones. 

1. St. Nicholas spared a baby from fire.
2. He also brought a child back to life after drowning.  
3. St. Nicholas could feed people with his mind. 
4. He spent a couple stints in jail and stopped an execution ...
5. … And one of his jail stints was for slapping another bishop.
6. St. Nicholas saved young maidens from prostitution.
7. St. Nicholas charmed dragons and banished demons. 
8. He saved a tub full of butchered boys. 

St. Nicholas spared a baby from fire.

St. Nicholas, best known as the patron saint of children, is credited with a myriad of miracles that validate this claim. The earliest attributed miracle is that he somehow miraculously saved a baby during his bishop consecration ceremony at the cathedral. 

According to the story, the baby’s mother absentmindedly left her child in the bathing tub, which was warming over the fire. After hearing the church bells ring out, the mother rushed out without a second thought for her tiny infant—she didn’t remember her baby until she returned home and saw the smoke-filled room. But instead of finding a charred or drowned baby, she peered over to find her little one contentedly smiling; all the credit for the kid’s survival went to the new Bishop Nicholas.

He also brought a child back to life after drowning.  

While formally patron saint of infants and children, it seems like St. Nicholas should more accurately be named patron saint of the negligent parent. Another miracle attributed to the saint involves a napping mother dropping her baby into the Dnieper River, where a whirlpool pulled the child down. 

The family had just sailed to Vyshgorod to celebrate the feast day of St. Boris and St. Gleb. Grieving over their drowned baby, the parents prayed to St. Nicholas to perform a miracle. The next morning, a still-drenched baby was heard crying inside of the still-locked Saint Sophia Cathedral, right in front of St. Nicholas’s icon. As the story goes, the dead saint dove into the river to rescue—and apparently revive—the baby. 

St. Nicholas could feed people with his mind. 

Feeding the hungry is noble. Visiting an Italian merchant in a dream, promising payment that appears in his hands the next morning, and convincing him to make a detour to Myra on his grain run to Egypt to feed the famished residents is downright impressive. 

In another less psychic version, St. Nicholas convinces a merchant to skim a bit of grain off the top of the perfectly measured piles to sell to him. As fate would have it, when he arrived in Egypt, no grain was missing, and it matched his originally measured cargo. The people remained well fed through the famine and even had enough for a harvest afterwards.

Even in death, there is a Byzantine legend of St. Nicholas coming back down to earth to get grain to feed the hungry before ascending back into the sky.

He spent a couple stints in jail and stopped an execution ...

Scenes of Santa Claus being arrested and serving a stint in jail are not an anomaly in Christmas movies. Sometimes Santa even goes on trial. 

But the reasons—and the jolly old elf’s experiences—were not nearly as sinister as those Bishop Nicholas faced. He spent five years in prison, potentially even in solitary confinement, under the Great Persecution. Roman emperor Diocletian was responsible for this final persecution of Christians; during his reign, churches were burned and Christians who refused to eschew their faith faced torture and death. Bishop Nicholas was said to be among those arrested for their steadfast allegiance to their Christian faith.

St. Nicholas—the patron saint of prisoners—is also said to have stopped an execution simply by walking up and grabbing the sword right out of the executioner’s hand. 

… And one of his jail stints was for slapping another bishop.

Bishop Nicholas’s second stint in jail came from slapping another bishop at the first Council of Nicaea. The point of the gathering was to help remedy a few specific schisms in the church, as Constantine was not a fan of discord. 

Tensions were high, and as Damaskinos of Athens told it, “The emperor was sitting on his throne, flanked by 159 bishops to his left and 159 to his right. Arian was presenting his views with great vigor and detail. As Saint Nicholas observed the scene, the emperor listened in complete silence and without interrupting this discourse. Outraged, and prompted by his saintly vigor, he walked up to Arius, faced him squarely and slapped his face.”

Bishop Nicholas was stripped of his garments and tossed into jail, but after a prayer to Jesus and Mother Mary, the holy figures returned him appropriate clothes and loosened his chains. The miracle had quite an impact, and the Council ended up siding with St. Nicholas’s view of things. 

St. Nicholas saved young maidens from prostitution.

The tradition of hanging a stocking by the fireplace seems innocent enough. However, the tradition is often attributed to a legend about St. Nicholas saving three maidens from being sold into slavery or becoming sex workers. In fact, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of sex trafficking and prostitution. 

Marriage in the first century Roman Empire required the arrangement of a dowry. According to legend, a formally wealthy man, now destitute, did not have the money for dowries. His daughters could not marry without a dowry; without marrying, they would be sold into slavery. 

It wasn’t particularly common for parents to sell their children into slavery. Nevertheless, this seemed to be the fate to befall these young women—until St. Nicholas stepped in by sharing his inheritance and flinging gold through a window, or perhaps coming down a chimney.

St. Nicholas charmed dragons and banished demons. 

Fighting evil is paramount for saints, whether dragons or demons. 

The prevalence of religious figures dominating dragons was not unique in the Middle Ages. St. Matthew was known to tame dragons, St. Martha for slaying them, and when a dragon terrified a town, St. Nicholas enchanted the mythical beast. As Scott Bruce, historian and editor of The Penguin Book of Dragons, explained to Smithsonian, dragons stood, “as the enemies of humankind, against which we measure the prowess of our heroes.”

Exorcism, or expelling demons, is another common trait of saints. As a bishop, Nicholas once took an ax to a demon-filled Cypress tree. He also walked through the countryside, clutching a gospel in his left hand and keeping his right hand free to bless the tormented. 

These days St. Nicholas is sometimes accompanied by Krampus, or other demonic creatures such as Buttnmandl.

He saved a tub full of butchered boys. 

The legend of an evil butcher that chops up three poor boys and stores them in a tub of brine is central to the French celebration of St. Nicholas Day. “La légende de Saint-Nicolas,” a morbid holiday children’s ditty, tells the tale of a cannibalistic butcher, sometimes known as Father Whipper:

“They had not yet entered
When the butcher killed them,
Cut them into little pieces
Put them in the salting tub as pigs.”

As the legend goes, St. Nicholas arrived seven years after the massacre and brought the three boys back to life (an older version of the tale involved three students and a murderous innkeeper). 

This more modern version pulls from two historical battles in France. The first was a 1477 attack on Nancy, France, where, as Nadia Hardy shared with Atlas Obscura, “It’s thought many of the inhabitants turned to cannibalism during the siege, out of desperation.” A prayer over St. Nicholas’s finger is attributed to the city’s victory. The second was a 1552 siege of Metz, France, where the residents remained triumphant and burned an effigy of Charles V, which was later resurrected as Père Fouettard. 

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