St. Nicholas the Wonderworker

Nicholas was born around the year two hundred and seventy at Patara, the son of devout Christian parents who left him their estate when he was still a young man. He spent the inheritance not on himself but on those in need, most famously on three sisters whose father had no dowry for them and was preparing to sell them into prostitution. Three nights in a row Nicholas threw a bag of gold through their window, the last time being caught by the father as he ran away.

He was ordained reader, deacon, and presbyter while still very young, and after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land was chosen by direct revelation to succeed the dead archbishop of Myra. He governed that see through the last great persecution under Diocletian, was imprisoned and tortured for the Faith, and emerged at the peace of Constantine to attend the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, where he is said to have struck Arius across the face for his blasphemy.

The wonders worked through him filled the synaxaria of every Orthodox nation. He calmed storms at sea, raised the drowned, fed the starving in a famine year, struck down corrupt officials and softened cruel ones. The sailors of every Mediterranean port took him for their patron, and the children of every Christian household keep his feast still.

He reposed in Myra on December the sixth, 343. His relics were translated to Bari in southern Italy in 1087, where they myrrh still flows from them. He is honored everywhere: in Russia his icon hangs in every home, in Greece his troparion is sung at every Liturgy, in the West his memory is the seed of the Father Christmas of the modern world. The Orthodox Church does not let the figure be sentimentalized; he remains a wonderworker, an iconoclast of injustice, and the swift help of all who call on him.