Joe Biel

After World War II, we shifted Christmas to the modern, what I would call the Coca-Cola version of Christmas, which is the presents, the tree, the chimney, parts of the story that had always been there, but were given additional weight.

All this today on Something You Should Know.

There's some similarity.

I mean, and that's a good way of putting it, that there's not a lot of uniformity.

I mean, in some cultures, Santa Claus is more of a punishing character where you're scared into submission and great behavior.

And then in other cultures, you're rewarded into good behavior.

And so I think that's probably the biggest fundamental difference.

But then in many cultures, Santa Claus is really like a mischievous figure.

That's really... That's where it gets you because...

you know in say Iceland or a lot of parts of Eastern Europe to this day you know that there's really a deeply held belief that you know Santa Claus is really there to make trouble and has a whole cast of characters that assist him with that and so who is Santa

Well, and again, this is another hotly disputed item because in the original Santa Claus was St.

Nick, one of many St.

Nicks in Roman Christianity.

But again, this is somebody that...

was never known to exist or there was there's no written record of him existing during his lifetime nobody began writing about him until 400 years after he would have lived so he would have lived towards the end of the third century you know after Christ but that's further complicated because

know rome had occupied the region at the time so there they weren't keeping a lot of birth records about you know christian bishops which he was one he was a very young bishop allegedly

in the folklore he had been captured from his you know he was from an area called mira and he was put in a roman prison for a very long time again all that without records we don't know exactly how long

but when he was released and went back home you know he's like the bishop going back to where he came from where he ostensibly rules to a certain degree he came back to find out that he everybody was telling him that the story was that he had died and so it was his bravery of surviving a roman prison that became you know so storied

that they put him up for sainthood, partly as a result of that.

But then, like every Santa story, rumors began spiraling outward, stories became increasingly exaggerated, and that's sort of where we don't know the length of Saint Nick's limit of his miracles.