HIDDEN HISTORY

The Secret Santa

Get woke. Learn the shocking secret history of Europe’s Black ‘Santa Claus’ tradition.

Statue in the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta in Giovinazzo (Apulia), Italy • Privately owned 19th-century Russian icon • 17th-18th century painting in the Basilica of St. Nicolas of Bari (Puglia), Italy • 14th-century statue in a chapel at the Norman castle in Sannicandro, Bari (Puglia), Italy

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While doing seemingly unrelated research on the web some years ago, I got an unexpected clue from an old Russian painting that we don’t know even half as much about St. Nicholas (aka Santa Claus) in America as we think we do.

After some 200 years of Christmastime tradition, you’d think that we’d know all that there is to know about a guy who has unrestricted access to our chimneys! But never in a million cups of spiked eggnog would I have guessed that, in the much older holiday customs of the Dutch, St. Nicholas has, instead of elves, an African sidekick — who’s Muslim to boot!

And you could’ve knocked me over with a snowflake when I learned how in the old icons of Italy, Russia, Spain, and elsewhere, even the patron saint of Christmas himself is pictured as a grandfatherly-looking black man.

Oh, by gosh, by golly — that’ll be a big, fat shock to Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News reporter who lost her job in October 2018 for her stunning defense of blackface.