What did the real Santa Claus look like? Viewers of a program broadcast Dec. 18 on British TV found out.
A team of forensic scientists at Britain's Manchester University has reconstructed the face of St. Nicholas of Myra-the precursor of 19th-century America's Santa Claus-from x-rays and measurements of the saint's skull, preserved with his other relics at Bari in Italy.
Repairs in the 1950s to the crypt of the basilica where the saint's remains were kept meant that they had to be temporarily moved, and the opportunity was taken to invite a professor of anatomy at the local university to x-ray them and take thousands of detailed measurements.
Using this data, Dr. Caroline Wilkinson in Manchester constructed a clay model of St Nicholas' head, to which another scientist added coloring, hair and beard. What emerges is a heavily-set face, like a bulldog's, with a broken nose and powerful jaws.
Nicholas was bishop of Myra, in what is now southwestern Turkey, in the early fourth century.
“Nicholas' life, although he was one of the most universally venerated saints in both East and West, is virtually unknown,” states the Oxford Dictionary of Saints before going on to recount the legends attached to his name. His relics were taken to Bari in 1087.
His feast day on Dec. 6 became in the Middle Ages an opportunity to give presents of nuts and fruit to the poor, and despite Protestant disapproval the Dutch persisted with the custom, bringing with them to the New World their observance of the feast of the saint they called Sinterklaas-a name anglicized into Santa Claus.
Religion News Service