Saint Nicholas: On The Essence of The Human Soul

by Charles G. McGuigan 12.2022

This all happened years ago, shortly before Christmas. I had tried to interview one of the so-called real Santas, but to no avail. Fawning PR flacks hovered around him, making an interview impossible. One person had told me that Santa didn’t become Santa until after Thanksgiving. I thought about some of his helpers, the men who carry out his work locally, men like Joe Stankus, people who really embody what Saint Nicholas was all about. But I wanted to meet the real St. Nick. I needed the interview (something I’d promised my daughter), but time was running out, deadline was creeping up on me. I knew the Polar Express made only one trip north each year, but that was on Christmas Eve, much too late for my purposes.

Fortunately, an old friend of mine named Blaze Orange told me he still had military connections from a time in his life when he had served in the Air Force, a time I had always assumed was imaginary. I had reasons to doubt Blaze’s veracity, too. There was the 38-foot Sportfisherman we were going to do some Gulf Stream fishing in that turned out to be a 12-foot punt, a pathetic vessel that would have capsized in a burbling creek. And then there was the RV he promised to let me use for a cross country trip. What he let me borrow was an old Dodge van, two-toned in harvest gold and mustard yellow. Also: It had no transmission.

But this time Blaze came through. On our way down to Langley Field, he told me a bit about the aircraft that would take me to Thule in northwest Greenland.

On Board A C-130

“It’s got a big, old bulbous body and the wings are on top of the fuselage,” Blaze said. He took a pull from his flask that contained what he called “his potion”. He wiped his lips with the camouflage cuff of his shirt. “It’s a military cargo plane,” he continued. “A C-One-Thirty. A four-engine turbo prop. Rugged, reliable, it can go just about anywhere. Hell, it can fly into the eye of a hurricane. And the tips of those props, when they get rotating, are doing better than the speed of sound. It’s a noisy plane, but it’ll get you up to the Polar Zone and back with no problem.”

When the C-130 got underway the air pulsed and quivered. It was the sound of a hundred mile an hour wind whistling through the Indy 500 just as the race started. The pilot’s name was Thresher and he told me that we were on the Polar Route, headed due north.

“We’re dropping off supplies in Pakistan, but we can let you down at Thule,” said Thresher. “We got us a naval air station there. We’ll refuel, and you can get up with a boy on the base by the name of Mallory.  He’s got himself one of those deHavilland Twin Otters that’ll land you right on the ice sheet.”

I drifted off to sleep with the whir and whistle of the C-130 lulling me, and when I woke and looked out the porthole I could see the last vestiges of greenery, a ring of spruce forest that gave way to a vast tundra.  As we crossed Baffin Bay, I could see small rocky islands locked in ice. And then we were over Greenland, and not a speck of green anywhere. Everything was white and gray.

The Twin Otter

Chris Mallory had enlisted with the Navy thirty years before, had since retired, and now ran his private Twin Otter on Polar excursions. Mainly, people just wanted to cross the ice cap, see the North Pole.

“I don’t get many people who actually want to be dropped off there,” he told me. His mustache was frozen above his lip as we made our way out to the hangar.

“You’re going to go see the big guy, aren’t you?” he asked, and I nodded. “Well, good luck. Not too many people get to see him. But I’ll take you on up, and drop you at the Pole.”

We climbed into the cockpit, and he cranked it up. “How long you plan on staying up there?” he asked.

“What time will we get there?”

“About noon,” he said.

“I’ll be ready at noon tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there waiting.”

Down Under The Ice

After leaving the plane, I checked the thermometer clipped to the zipper pull of my parka: It read 37degrees below zero. Overhead, the moon was bright, nearly full, and there were stars I had never before seen. All around me was ice, and not a sound. There was no wind. It was almost as if I had stepped off the top of the world and tripped into outer space.

Two small people, dressed in heavy furs, approached me out of the darkness. They crept along the ice like wolves, and I could not make out their legs. I followed them toward an outcropping, a sheet of ice that formed a sort of hill. In the face of that hill was an opening. We entered a cave, and then started descending stairs that were carved from the ice, and the deeper we went the warmer the temperature became. As we approached the bottom, I could see light.  We walked into a giant cavern carved out of the ice. I had no idea how deep we were, but we had trudged down those steps for a good half-hour.

The ice of the rounded walls and ceiling were a crystal blue, and there seemed to be a sun behind this wall of ice, a yellow, warming sun, yet the ice was not melting.

Deirdre And Elena

My two escorts had shed their furs. They were elves, smallish people. One was called Elena, her skin the color of cream-lightened coffee, with dark eyes and black hair; the other was named Deirdre and her skin was pale and her hair ashen blonde and her eyes silvery gray. Deirdre hummed to herself the entire time. Her mind was elsewhere. Elena, on the other hand, was talkative and engaging.

“You’re here to see the Man, aren’t you?” said Elena.

“Yes, I am.”

“Well follow me,” she said. “He’s half-expecting you.”

I followed her from one cave to another. She walked quickly, and was barefoot. I had already removed my parka and layer after layer of sweaters. It was warm down here, and all the furnishings were of wicker. There were lush, tropical plants, and no shortage of elves, though almost every one of them I saw was a female, and none of them was working.

“I thought y’all’d be busy with Christmas coming?”

Elena stopped, and turned around, looking at me quizzically. “Busy with what?” she said.

“You know, making toys.”

“No, that’s a myth. Nick’s bag is all he needs. He reaches in, and what he needs comes out. It’s a sort of fishes and loaves thing. He can carry every present for every child in the world in one sack. Don’t ask me how it works. It just does.

New Age Time/Space

Deirdre had sidled up on us. “Here, and all around Saint Nicholas the laws of physics are suspended,” she said. “All the fields are unified and there is no time. Saint Nicho…”

“He doesn’t like that name,” said Elena. “Take it down a notch. His name’s Nick, and none of us really understands how any of this happens.”

“You don’t have the proper respect for him,” said Deirdre. “He’s a holy man and we should be honored just to be . . .”

“Give it a rest DeeDee.”

“My name’s Deirdre.”

“All right D. And stop humming that New Age crap. It’s about to drive me crazy.”

As Deirdre left our company, Elena took me on a slight detour. We entered a chamber that was lined with beverages of every description. She went to shelves where each bottle wore a red miter, and pulled down a fifth of Jamaican rum and a couple of tumblers. “Nick drinks rum, and he drinks it neat,” said Elena.

Aurora Borealis Halo

We proceeded down a narrow hall to a large rounded room, a sort of study, the curved walls of which were lined with books.  The man who sat in a leather chair was tall, large, but by no means fat. In fact, he was lean, and though his hair and beard were both white and curly and braided in dreadlocks, his face, a deep mahogany, was youthful. He wore a white cotton shirt without any buttons, and white cotton pants without any pockets, and around his head was a pulsing light of many colors, not unlike a small version of the Aurora Borealis.  He wore headphones, and his head was gently rocking back and forth. He held a book in his hand that was creased at the spine.

He looked up and directed his golden eyes first at me and then at Elena. He eyed the bottle of rum. “Bless you, sweet woman,” he said. “How about pouring us all a round?”

Elena uncapped the bottle and poured three tumblers half full of rum and passed them around. He sipped the drink, relishing the taste. “I’ve always loved rum,” he said. “It reminds me of warm climes and turquoise waters and brown-skinned women. I can taste the Caribbean in it.”

 I sat down in a chair next to him and moved up close to him, my eyes squinting against the rainbow aura suspended above his head. “I can’t turn it off,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I said, “But listen, what should I call you? How should I refer to you in the article? Santa Claus?”

He frowned and shook his head. “No, no, I don’t like that name at all, never have,” he said. “That’s what that hack cartoonist Thomas Nast came up with. It’s of Austrian or German origin, but it’s not me. I’m Nicholas, Saint Nicholas. But that sounds too formal and pompous. Tell you the truth I like the name Nick best. Just call me Nick.”

He sipped again from his rum.

Born In Lycia

“You have a million questions, don’t you?” he asked, and his golden eyes flickered with limbic sparks.

“At least a thousand.”

“Well, I’ve got the answers. Shoot.”

“Let’s start from the beginning.”

“Where I was born, you mean?”

“Yes. Where were you born?”

“I was born in the village of Patara in Lycia,” he said, looking at me. “Those names mean nothing to you, do they?”

I shook my head.

“The country of Lycia and the village of Patara have been gone for centuries,” he said. “They were in the region that’s now called Turkey. But when I was a young man, Patara was a bustling village and the warm winds blew off the Mediterranean and men sold fish in the market and women wove on outdoor looms. It was a wondrous place.”

He got a faraway look in his eyes, and removed the pipe from his mouth. His nostrils widened, releasing blue smoke. The tobacco was a blend, and he told me whenever he smelled the blue Latakia and the Macedonian, he thought of his now defunct homeland.

Calming Waters, Stirring Winds

“At an early age I left home for the sea,” he said. “All the islands. Samos and Chios and Thodes and Karpathos. I loved the water, the clear blue water. There is no water like the water of the Aegean. It makes your eyes bluer, if they are blue; greener, if they are green; and more golden than a Midas touch, if they are gold.”

Nick had worked on board several sailing vessels, carrying olive oil in clay urns from Greece to the islands and back to Lycia. On his journeys, he got to know a lot about the ancient Greek and Roman myths that were quickly dying out in the wake of Christianity. And on one of these journeys a strange thing happened.

“I was on the third watch and a squall came up on us,” he told me. “There were suddenly twenty-foot seas so we lowered our sails. For some reason I felt compelled to call out, and I did, yelling, ‘Seas calm.’ And the seas calmed. I didn’t tell any of my shipmates about it.  I held it close to my heart: It was a secret.”

“On another occasion, well below Crete, the wind, all traces of it, died. For four days we drifted, using oars, as we were able, but making no real progress. Our rations were down, and we dipped the dregs of our water urns. The water we drank was green and crawling. That night, alone on the prow, I called out to the full moon, ‘Winds rise’, and the winds arose, so we set the sails, and headed homeward.”

At the time, Nick did not know where this power came from, and told no one he possessed it. Back in Lycia, he began praying and left his work on the water. By degrees he became a priest and later a bishop. He sensed when people, particularly children, were in need, and would help them whenever he could. It brought him great joy.

“I always felt more alive when I was helping people, particularly the little ones,” said Nick. “But any one, really. Any sort of creature, human or otherwise.”

Sign Of The Pawnbroker

He told me the story of three girls whose father and mother were impoverished. These three maidens were destined to lives of prostitution. Nick couldn’t bear the thought, so he threw three solid gold balls into their open bedroom windows. With handsome dowries in hand, the three girls escaped their fate of prostitution.

“You know what those three gold balls became,” said Elena.

“No,” I told her.

“They became the emblem for pawnbrokers. That’s where the three gold balls came from.”

“I don’t understand that. How could that be twisted into an advertising logo?”

“It’s called marketing,” Elena said.

“But,” said Nick. “Pawnbrokers do provide a certain service to the financially destitute.”

“At a price,” said Elena.

“Still,” Nick said. “There is some good in pawnbroking.”

The Pickled Boys Story

Elena was getting impatient. “Everybody knows the three golden balls story,” she said. “Tell him the other one.”

“Which one?”

“The pickled boys story.”

“But that’s so gruesome.”

“I’m sure our guest would like to hear it,” said Elena. She looked over at me, and smiled.

“I would,” I said.

“Okay, here goes,” said Nick. “There was an innkeeper in southern Lycia, in a coastal town. He was a murderous rogue, and killed three boys, cut them up and preserved them in three barrels of vinegar. Pickled them. A Sweeney Todd of his era. Even back then there were demented killers; nothing’s changed. When I found out about it, I went to the inn and paid the innkeeper handsomely for the three barrels, and then poured off the vinegar, put the different body parts together, and prayed to God. The three boys were restored. They came back to life. When I heard them breathe, I passed out.”

Lizzie Borden Got An Ax

“Tell him about all the Firsts,” said Elena. “I know he’d like to hear about them.”

“All right,” Nick said. “Let’s see. I gave Jonas Salk his first microscope, and Stephen Hawkins his first telescope. I gave Jackson Pollack his first set of oil paints, though I’m still not sure if I did the right thing there. Time will tell. I gave Bach his first harpsichord, Beethoven his first piano.”

“Tell him some of the ones that didn’t work out that well,” said Elena.

“Well, I did give Einstein his first abacus, but he flunked math anyway,” Nick said. “Later, I gave him his first pocket watch, and he became obsessed with time. The rest is history.”

“No, not those. Tell him about some of the others, the ones you really screwed up. Tell him what you gave Lizzie Borden.”

“What do you mean?”

“The ax, how you gave her the ax. Tell him about that one.”

“It was a tomahawk, and it was made of rubber.”

“But, it was still pretty much an ax.”

 “Okay,” said Nick, with a groan. “It was an ax.”

Failures And Successes

“Tell him some of the others,” Elena said. “I love these; they’re great.”  

“All right, all right. Let’s see, I gave Curt Cobain his first guitar, Rush Limbaugh his first microphone, and Chief Justice Roger Taney his first gavel. I also gave Dick Cheney his first board game—which was RISK—but how was I supposed to know he’d go global on us. One of my biggest regrets was giving a toy rocket to Elon Musk. But at the time I had no idea he was an Alien.”

“There are a lot more . . . failures,” Elena needled.

“You’re right,” said Nick. “And a lot of successes.”

Chimneys And Toilets

Deirdre reappeared, as noiselessly as before. She knelt next to Nick and looked into his face, adoringly, which seemed to make him fidget.

“He’ll want to know about the chimney,” said Deirdre.

“You do come down the chimney?” I asked.

“Oh sure,” said Nick. “When there is a chimney. Otherwise I jimmy a door or window, pick a lock. There’s no house I can’t get into. But if there’s a chimney, that’s my way in.”

“It just seems like such a dirty way of getting into a house, I mean with the soot and all,” I said.

“It’s not nearly as dirty a way of getting into a house as some other immortals use,” said Elena.

“Don’t go there,” Deirdre said. “Show some sense of decorum.”

“What do you mean, Elena?” I asked.

“Little known fact,” said Nick. “The Easter Bunny comes into the house through the toilet.”

“Talk about messy,” said Elena, and then turned to me. “Can you imagine?”

Deirdre got up and glided out of the room, and Santa turned to me and said, “Sometimes Deirdre’s a little too ethereal for her own good. She takes herself too seriously,” he added, then raised his voice and turned to Elena and said, “But you ought to go easy on her. She means well, she’s just been listening to the wrong kind of music for far too long.”

The Laplanders’ Reindeers

Elena changed the subject. “By the way,” she said, turning to me. “How many reindeer does it take to change a light bulb?”

I shrugged.

“None,” said Elena. “If the reindeer happens to be Rudolph. His bulb never needs changing.”

“What about the reindeer,” I asked. “How’d they figure into it?”

“Well,” said Nick. “That all started when we moved north. I don’t like the cold, never have. I was born way down south near the Equator, and in all these centuries I still haven’t acclimated to the North Pole. For hundreds of years Jamaica was our home.”

“Those were the days,” said Elena, longingly. “That’s when you started drinking the rum.”

“But,” said Nick looking at Elena as his eyebrows arched with impatience. “But, then Columbus came and that screwed things up for us. We had to move, always north. Up into Canada and then into the Arctic Circle. That’s when the Laplanders introduced us to the magic reindeer, and that’s when I started hauling that sleigh and wearing fur collars and knee-high boots. You know, I still travel incognito down to the Caribbean, and some of the less populated Keys. On my off time.”

Elena replenished the drinks, and then Nick told me he’d have to be going soon to prepare for the Christmas run. He was a kind man and a gracious host, but I still had hundreds of questions I wanted to ask. With his hectic schedule, Nick would have time for just one more question. I strained, trying to think of just the right question.

Hope: Essence Of The Soul

“You’re hoping for some sort of wrap up quote, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I’m looking for.”

“Try this. By my reckoning, I’m well over sixteen hundred years old, older than any man alive.  I’ve outlived Methuselah by hundreds of years. I’ve seen the world change a lot in my time. I’ve seen great ideas that helped people, and other ideas that destroyed entire cultures. I have seen love and innocence, and hate and corruption. I have watched the human race mature, and then massacre itself. The human spirit is a strange thing. It defies reason. It’s hypocritical, yet it is miraculous.”

“I used to think that faith was at the core of all good men. But people will believe in almost anything, and they’ll kill other people out of that faith. And love? Granted, it’s a wonderful thing, but all too often people love the wrong things, or they love people for the wrong reasons. Both faith and love are corruptible.”

“But hope is another story. It is the essence of the human soul. You can live without faith, and you can live without love. At least for some period of time. But I’ll tell you what you can’t live without, not even for a moment. You can’t live without hope. You can always hope for faith, you can always hope for love. You can hope for justice. And in these days of perpetual doom and gloom while we watch in terror as greedy corporations destroy the Earth and exterminate tens of thousands of species each year, in these grimmest of times when evil men try to overturn democracies, we need hope more now than ever. For you can hope for anything, which can sometimes lead to action.”

He paused for a moment, brought the tumbler to his lips, tipped it back and drained it. Then he said this: “Hope in this world is personified by one thing, and one thing only—children. And that’s why I do what I do every Christmas. I answer the wishes of the hopeful.”

When Nick finished speaking, he rose from his chair and the small rainbow halo that had floated above his head throughout the interview began to expand. As it grew larger, this ring of color began dropping slowly, encircling Nick, and as it did, he began to disappear. First his head, then his torso, next his legs, and finally his feet. And then there was nothing left of him at all.