The Real Life Santa Claus Helped Girls Escape Sex Trafficking
When we think of Santa Claus, we all invariably imagine the same old fat white dude who year after year, continues to be singularly obsessed with children, and whether they’re naughty or nice.
But that poser isn’t anything like the real Santa Claus, or at least the real person that Santa Claus was based off on: St. Nicholas.
Born sometime around 280 AD in Turkey, St. Nicholas was a bachelor. But before you get excited, he wasn’t the DTF kind of bachelor, he was DTP kind — you know, down to pray.
As a bishop, St. Nicholas was one hundo percent celibate and since he had nothing else going on in his life beside God and whatever tf people did back then, he got his kicks giving dowries to poor God-fearing girls so they didn’t have to grow up to be prostitutes.
Of course, they would have to marry whatever loser proposed to them first and do literally whatever that a-hole wanted for the rest of their lives, but it was still a relative win for them — and a win for St. Nicholas.
And generally speaking, people were into it.
After he died St. Nicholas became one of the most popular saints in Europe, especially among the Dutch who called him Sinter Klaas for short — Sint is Saint in Dutch — which is how the Americans came to bastardize St. Nick and everything he stood for.
When the Dutch immigrated to New York back in the 1770s, the local newspapers reported on this strange Dutch phenomenon that occurred every December: these foreigners would all get together, have a nice dinner and give each other stockings filled with toys and fruit.
How neat!
By the 1820s, when stores started advertising for Christmas shopping, they used the newly popular Santa to urge parents to buy their children gifts that they probably couldn’t afford, and the rest, is holly jolly history.
St. Nicholas may have been the better dude, but I’ll take my creepy old man with a tragic fashion sense any old day.
[H/T Racked]
