Saint Nicholas 

HEADLINE: Whatever Happened to Saint Nicholas? by Father Dwight Longenecker 

HEADLINE: St. Nicholas: Hidden Patron of America by Daniel Dougherty 

HEADLINE: Why I Love St. Nicholas by Charles Coulombe 

FROM Father Dwight Longenecker: Eleven years later publisher William B. Gilley brought out Sante Claus, The Children’s Friend. Now the gift-giving saint arrived from the North in a sleigh with flying reindeer. This image along with a cute, didactic poem sealed Bishop Nicholas’ fate. Not only was Sante Claus in a sleigh with reindeer, but he arrived on Christmas Eve—not December sixth, and he arrived with a ghastly new idea: He now “had a list and was checking it twice.” He was “gonna find out who’s naughty or nice.” Put in the language of the 1821 poem, he had a ”long, black birchen rod… directs a Parent’s hand to use when virtue’s path his sons refuse.” His gifts were respectable and safe: “pretty doll… peg-top, or a ball; no crackers, cannons, squibs, or rockets to blow their eyes up, or their pockets. No drums to stun their Mother’s ear, nor swords to make their sisters fear; but pretty books to store their mind with knowledge of each various kind.”

Luther and the Protestants have a problem with this one because the kids and adults just won’t go along with this one. 
His feast is observed in so many different ways by so many different peoples in testimony to the love they bear him. His reputation as a gift-giver comes from his saving three daughters of a ruined merchant from a life of infamy by flinging three bags of gold into their home on three successive nights; he is resorted to as a wonderworker both by his having revived dead boys and because of the miraculous manna that has flowed from his bones since his death — and continues to work miraculous cures.