Hi everyone, and welcome back to 1,001 Heroes, Legends, Histories, and Mysteries Podcast.

This is your host, John Haggadord, and this is another one of those rare times when we have an episode that checks off all four of the categories in our title, Heroes, Legends, Histories, and Mysteries.

It's Santa Claus checks off all four, and a bunch of others as well.

Just this past weekend I had the opportunity to travel north with my son from here in Virginia to a little town in South Central Pennsylvania, and know it wasn't Bethlehem to pick up a puppy.

That part of Pennsylvania just north of the Maryland border is a mix of farms and rural communities and old towns like Red Lion P.A. with lots of wooded, twisty old roads and rolling hills.

Most of the homes and businesses were already for Christmas, and no doubt all the kids were being extra good for Santa.

Whenever you travel around Christmas you find yourself asking, how does the big man do it? How does he cover such a big part of the known world in just a few hours?

And of course, the kids have lots of questions too. Hopefully this story will answer a lot of them.

As it turns out, Santa Claus, otherwise known as St. Nicholas, or Chris Cringle, has a long history steeped in Christmas traditions.

Today he is thought of mainly as the jolly man in red who brings toys to good girls and boys on Christmas Eve, but his story stretches all the way back to the third century, when St. Nicholas walked the earth and became the patron saint of children and of sailors.

In today's story, we'll talk about the history of Santa Claus from his earliest origins to the street corner Santas of today.

And discover how two New Yorkers, Clement Clark Moore at Thomas Nast, were major influences on the Santa Claus that millions of children wait for each Christmas Eve.

The legend of Santa Claus can be traced back to around the third century AD in what we know to be Turkey today, where a monk named St. Nicholas, according to legend, gave up all his inherited wealth and traveled the countryside helping the poor and the sick.

There are many stories of his kindness, one popular one being the time he saved three poor sisters from being sold into slavery by their father by providing them with a dowry so that they could be married.

As the years passed, Nicholas's popularity spread and he became known as the protector of children and sailors.

His feast day is celebrated on the anniversary of his death, December 6th of each year. This was traditionally considered a lucky day to make large purchases or to get married.

By the Renaissance, St. Nicholas was the most popular saint in Europe. Even after the Protestant Reformation, when the veneration of Catholic saints began to be discouraged, St. Nicholas maintained a positive reputation, especially in Holland.

By the Middle Ages, Nicholas's fame had spread to much of Europe, thanks in part to the dissemination of parts of his skeleton to churches in Italy, where they were venerated as relics.

St. Nicholas's popularity eventually spread to northern Europe, where stories of the monk minkled with tutonic folk-tills of elves, Norse gods, and Skygerians.

In the Netherlands, St. Nicholas took on the Dutch-friendly spelling, Cinterclass, S-I-N-T-E-R-K-L-A-A-S.

He was depicted as a tall, white-bearded man and red clerical robes who arrived every December 6th on a boat to leave gifts or coal lumps at children's homes.

Stories of Cinterclass were likely brought here to the New World by Dutch settlers in the Hudson River Valley.

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