Rockville Centre's Church of the Ascension teaches who St. Nicholas really was

Santa Claus hasn’t always dressed in red, or delivered toys on an airborne sleigh hauled by eight reindeer.

After the feast day of St. Nicholas, observed on Dec. 6, and before Christmas is “the perfect time to talk to the kids about who St. Nicholas — Santa Claus — was,” said the Rev. Kevin Morris, of Rockville Centre’s Church of the Ascension.

He stood in front of a table in the hall of the North Village Avenue church, where several dozen Santa Clauses sat, dressed in blue, a color the Christmas icon often sported before red became his primary color over the last century.

The true story of the jolly, rotund man with a long white beard begins with Nicholas, who was born to a wealthy family during the third century in Asia Minor, now Turkey, according to Carol Peterkin Myers, founder of the St. Nicholas Center. Raised a devout Christian, he gave all that he had to the poor, the sick and the suffering.

Nicholas became famous for these saintly deeds when he was Bishop of Myra, Myers notes in a handout available at the Church of the Ascension. He later suffered for his faith and was exiled and imprisoned under the Roman emperor Diocletian. After his release, Bishop Nicholas attended the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. The anniversary of his death on Dec. 6 became a feast day of celebration and he became a saint within a century after dying.

Father Morris said every month the Church of the Ascension hosts a prayer breakfast for children before mass, during which they discuss different topics. On Dec. 9, he decided to teach the families about St. Nicholas.

“We wanted to talk about who he was as a bishop of the church and somebody who was dedicated to the life of Jesus,” Morris said. “We’re trying to sort of reclaim who he really was. This is somebody who was a defender of the faith.”

He asked Frank Seipp, president of Rockville Centre’s Phillips House museum, if he could borrow his personal collection of Santas dressed in blue to display at the church. Seipp said he has collected them over several decades, and often received them from his children. One, he noted, he was gifted one from a Sunday School student.

“I’ve collected these over 40 years,” he said. “They’re hard to come by, really, in blue.”

The image of Santa Claus, a phonetic alteration from the German Sankt Niklaus and the Dutch Sinterklaas, changed over the years. Washington Irving created a jolly St. Nicholas character in 1809 in the “Knickerbocker’s History of New York,” which was perpetuated in 1823 by the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

Thomas Nast’s illustrations of Santa in Harper’s Magazine continued morphing him from a bishop to a symbol of secular seasonal spirit, and 1930s Coca-Cola and Pepsi advertisements drawn by Haddon Sundblom and Normal Rockwell also contributed to the modern-day Santa Claus. A man once shown dressed in Bishop’s robes holding a shepherd’s staff became a happy fat man in a red suit with white fur trim.

“When you think of Santa Claus, you don’t see a bishop,” Morris said. “That’s what he was.”

The collection of Santas is on display through Christmas at the Church of the Ascension — at 71 N. Village Ave.