Have you seen St. Nick?

There are many myths, traditions and holiday folklore we grow up with. From magical elves to a mythical character based on the actuality of a saint to very aerodynamic reindeer to mistletoe. And of course, the sacred truths and the tantrums surrounding my refusal to wear a shepherd costume in the church’s Christmas extravaganza.

It’s that time of the year when we are just finishing the stomach medicine, we needed from overeating all the leftover Halloween candy. We sail face-first into three plates of decadence hitting a turkey and pumpkin pie with a vengeance, weeks of leftovers and blisters from a dark Friday. We then begin eating cookie dough and testing out broken Christmas cookies (as in… yep, this one broke too easily no recourse but to eat it…) and sampling all the potluck delights from church to job to family parties.

It’s a downhill slide from October until we hit the ball-drop on New Year’s Eve and then we have to come up with ways to undo all the damage to our svelte figures. Oh, the humanity! We can discuss all the guilt-relieving resolutions at a later date, followed by guilt-relieving solutions to broken resolutions.

Around the first week of December (which is where we are now, and if you haven’t noticed we only have 16 shopping day left until Christmas), our family celebrated St. Nick’s Day on the sixth of December. It was a holiday, supposedly the feast day of St. Nicholas and honored his tradition of giving gifts around Christmas which would be in the spirit of Christ telling us that the blessings came from the giving.

I grew up in Milwaukee, and Journal/Sentinel features contributor and MetroParent Magazine, Amy Schwabe dug up an interesting item from the newspaper archives concerning that day as I knew it growing up.

“Like the fish fry and frozen custard, the celebration of St. Nick’s Day, though not exclusively a Milwaukee tradition, is especially strong here. Tradition calls for children to hang their stockings or put out their shoes in the hopes that St. Nicholas will visit in the night, leaving a trinket or two for good children. Naughty kids will find a lump of coal or a switch instead.”

My mom and dad who always went above and beyond in embellishing the normal traditions added their version of “the Elf on the Shelf,” which was pretty spectacular in itself because they presented it to us in the 60s as opposed to the popularized one from Chanda Bell who came out with her children’s book and spawned a trendy tradition in 2005.

Of course, we didn’t know it at the time, but dad took a stuffed elf Christmas decoration and ran from window to window outside, puppeting the elf to peer into windows until we would run in and scream that we saw one of Santa’s elves. And then it would disappear to another window. The trick was, if we saw it and looked into the eyes and screamed, “MERRY CHRISTMAS,” it would become a toy that we could bring into the house.

It was a holiday to pretty much tide us all over until Christmas and it would always come with one toy and a stocking full of candy. Little did we all know back then that the excess sugar didn’t pacify us until Christmas, but did put a nice warm “edge” to the whole “waiting for Christmas” angst.

But Christmas was always a time for family gatherings, grand spectacle light displays, more Christmas cookies than one person should ever ingest in such a small season of time, and of course, Christmas pageants, angel’s wings, a star – and there, sleeping in the manger – amid all the hype and glitter was Jesus, the humble truth of the season. I’ve now learned that He came so that we could find our way through the maze of politically correct lawn decorations, family feuds about which Christmas movies to watch, the sea of second mortgages taken out to buy Christmas presents and very simply to find our way home.