[ILLUSTRATIONS]

[St. Nicholas and Other Saints]
Gentile da Fabriano. (Florence.)		Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
[St. Nicholas in East Frisia]
Reproduced from Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Das festliche Jahr.		12
[Christkindchen (Kris Kringle) and HansTrapp in Alsace]
Reproduced from Reinsberg-Düringsfeld.		18
[St. Nicholas Scenes in the Stained Glassof Bourges Cathedral]
From P. Lacroix, Science and Art in the Middle Ages.		34
[Three Scenes from the Early Life of St.Nicholas]
Beato Angelico. (Rome.)		38
[The Young Clerk Strangled by the Devil]
A. Lorenzetti. (Florence.)		42
[St. Nicholas Restoring a Boy to his Father]
Fresco at S. Croce, Florence.		46
[St. Nicholas and the Murdered Schoolboys]
L. di Bicci. (Metropolitan Museum, New York.)		48
[Another Picture of the Same Scene]
F. Pesellino. (Florence.)		50
[St. Nicholas and the Three Maidens]
A. Lorenzetti. (Florence.)		52
[Another Picture of the Same Scene]
Florentine School. (Louvre, Paris.)		54
[Another Picture of the Same Scene]
L. di Bicci (?). (Metropolitan Museum, New York.)		56
[Madonna and Child and Various Saints]
L. di Bicci. (Florence.)		60
[St. Nicholas and the Money Lender]
Fresco at S. Croce, Florence.		64
[The Boy Nicholas Elected Bishop]
A. Lorenzetti. (Florence.)		68
[St. Nicholas Saving the City in Time ofFamine]
A. Lorenzetti. (Florence.)		80
[Norman Baptismal Font at Winchester]84
[St. Nicholas Saves the Knights about to beBeheaded]
F. Pesellino. (Florence.)		86
[Triumphal Car of St. Lucy at Syracuse inSicily]112
[Images of Breton Saints]116
[St. Nicholas Saves the City from Famine]
Beato Angelico. (Rome.)		118
[St. Nicholas Rescues Seamen]
L. Monaco. (Florence.)		122
[St. Nicholas in the Mosaics of St. Mark’sin Venice]142

[ST. NICHOLAS]

[CHAPTER I]
ST. NICHOLAS, SANTA CLAUS, AND KRIS KRINGLE

The good St. Nicholas, the bishop-saint, is strangely little known in America. He has lent his name to a church here and there and to a popular magazine for children, his protégés. But how many people are familiar with the story of his life? How many even know the date of his own special festival? There are countries in which his memory is not thus neglected, in which the festival of St. Nicholas is one of the important events of the year. An English newspaper of the first year of the war has this to report concerning the Belgian custom:

The feast of St. Nicholas, December 6th, was celebrated at the Belgian refugee camp at Earle’s Court, England, with presents for the children, stockings hung up, a Christmas tree, and all the rest of the children’s festivities which we associate with Christmas eve and Christmas morning. This was not a mere anticipation of Christmas. St. Nicholas’ day, and not Christmas, is the children’s festival in Holland, Belgium, and parts of Germany, and we have borrowed the hanging up of stockings from them and turned it into a Christmas custom.[1]

Letters from Belgian children, exiled in France for more than two years, offer further evidence of the intimate and friendly relationship existing between St. Nicholas and his Belgian children. Here is a touching passage from a letter written by a little eight-year-old Belgian girl from Varengeville-sur-Mer, in France, to an American “godmother”; the adult English used in translation fails to reproduce the naïve charm of the original.