We love St. Nicholas (we don't really do Santa, as explained here) and today is his feast day!
Last night, the Zoomlians left their shoes out and are just discovering the candy inside...
Do you know why St. Nicholas is associated with presents? It's not like his feast is that close to Christmas - St. Lucy is much closer.
St. Nicholas lived in the 300s in the Roman city of Myra. There were two easy ways to become a slave in the Roman empire: be conquered or be poor enough to be sold by your parents. (Are we getting too far from Christmas for you?)
St. Nicholas was not poor (and he was a Roman citizen)! In fact, his parents had just died and left him fabulous wealth. But Nicholas wanted to give everything to God and, as his first step, decided to give away his money. He prayed for guidance and looked for opportunities.
He heard of about a poor man with three daughters. Back in the day you needed a dowry to marry, and he had no way to provide for any of his daughters so he had determined to sell them into the, er, worst kind of slavery.
St. Nick wanted to help the man, but mindful of Jesus' "not letting the left hand know what the right hand was doing", wanted it to be anonymus. So...
He put enough money for a dowry in a bag and dropped it down their chimney in the middle of the night... where it fell into a sock that had been hung near the hearth to dry... Sound more familiar? He did that three nights in a row and saved all three girls.
St. Nicholas is also the patron saint of children.
Best St. Nicholas site ever.
And, to fill your shoe, This Fabulous Meme!
If you were trapped on a desert island and it was Christmas and all you had was a small generator, Christmas lights for your coconut tree, an endless supply of Christmas cookies and eggnog, your CD player and 6 Christmas CDs , which 6 albums would you want them to be?
If you can find Amazon links, we can listen to snippets...
My answers:
1 Theatre of Voices, Carols from the Old and New Worlds
2 Paul Hillier, Traditional and Modern Carols
3 Canadian Brass, The Christmas Album
4 Anonymus 4, Wolcum Yule
5 Westminster Cathedral Choir, Christmas Carols (not in print)
6 A Very Veggie Christmas
Why 6? St. Nicholas' feast day is December 6th. Plus I started with 5, but couldn't whittle the list down enough. And I still didn't get Mitch Miller in there!
I will tag The Emperor over at The Inside Blog, The Queen of Carrots, Tracy at Organic Learning, Kate in NJ, and Melissa in the Bonny Glen
1 comment:
Oh, how did I miss this? I am in..It may take a good think first, but I'll do it. ;-)
We enjoyed Demi's book about St Nick this week.
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