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But he’s not quite like you’ve been told. He was St. Nicholas of Myra, in fourth-century Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), and as Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly shows, some Americans are re-discovering a truly profound Christmas character: “St. Nicholas was a real person. Not a fairy, not someone who’s flying through the sky…

Scandals galore, the Fall of Man, the Pope on Original Sin (as per Cathleen Kaveny at dotCommonweal)–how did it all happen? Answer: Evolution made us do it. From Natalie Angier’s science column in the NYT: Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal,…

Yes, I knew about the anti-papist origins of “hocus pocus,” a riff on the formula of consecration in Latin in the Mass, hoc est corpus meum, or “this is my body.” But it turns out the “Hokey Cokey,” as the ditty is known in Scotland, where anti-Catholic prejudice runs high (and little love runs the…

Take the “Christmas Quiz” at Christian History. Ten questions, among them: Apart from a famously repetitive carol, what do the “twelve days of Christmas” refer to? Which of the following best describes the origin of the candy cane? When did Christians first start celebrating Christmas on December 25? In 614, Persian invaders sacked Jerusalem. Amidst…
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