Today is Wednesday, October the 26th, 2022, and this is the Daily Article podcast.

Today's article is narrated by Chris Elkins of the Denison Forum and written by Dr. Jim Denison.

The Christmas shopping season is already going strong.

Christmas decorations are up in stores and on some houses as well. In that context,

I have good news and bad news regarding Santa Claus. The good news, we now have archaeological

evidence that he is real. The bad news? This evidence comes in the form of a tomb that has just been discovered.

In other words, he's real,

but he's dead. The historic Santa Claus was St. Nicholas of Myra, a bishop who lived from

80 to 70 to 343. The Santa Claus story was based on his reputed ministry of distributing gifts to the poor

and the needy. Now, archaeologists say they have discovered

his tomb beneath St. Nicholas Church in Demery, a town in the Turkish province of Antalya.

The church is named for him, of course, but it had been thought that his bones were moved to

Italy during the First Crusade in the 11th century. However, during a routine survey this month, his tomb was found beneath the church's floor mosaic.

You can visit the church, though you will not see St. Nicholas's actual sarcophagus since it has not yet been excavated.

Dimri is 3,730 miles from the North Pole. Few of us can visit Santa up there,

but every year pilgrims from around the world flock to this church in Turkey, where they pack

the sanctuary for a December service. Father Ambrosios Corozidis, who leads the liturgy, explains, in the West, we seem to have

everything, but in fact, we have a lack of love in our hearts, so we need someone to visit us

even once a year to give us that love. Father Corositas could have been reading the morning

news. A health teacher killed in a South St. Louis school shooting, loved her students, as her daughter

told reporters.

The number of school shootings in the U.S. has already passed the record set in 2021 with

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