Growing up, I went to an Irish Roman Catholic school. I’m not Catholic, so Bible study and mass were basically story time for a young and very imaginative Dylan.

That said, I feel like we don’t talk about how wild the origin story of Ol’ Saint Nick is.

Nick was born into a wealthy Christian family in what is now modern-day Turkey. (Santa wasn’t white, my dudes. Sorry.)

“So what’s that gotta do with the fat dude who drops presents off at our houses in the middle of the night.”

That tradition has a pretty dark backstory:

See, Nick used the wealth that he was born into to free sex slaves.

At night, he would sneak into houses—sometimes by climbing on roofs—and he would leave sacks of gold coins to the enslaved or to their parents so that they could pay the dowries for their freedom.

Then at the First Council of Nicaea, he slapped tf out of an Arian heretic for disputing that Jesus was the son of God and was imprisoned several times throughout his life.

(Imprisonment, torture, and execution were usually prerequisites to get sainthood.)

In another story, Saint Nick resurrected three dead children who had been murdered by the town butcher.

During a famine, the butcher lured the kids to his house, killed them, and pickled their remains and planned to sell them as ham.

Since Saint Nick is often depicted with those three pickled babies, somewhere along the way, folks decided he was the patron Saint of children, and his story evolved into one of this jolly dude who genuinely loved making kids happy.

One time, St. Nick intervened to stop an execution at the last second like “Whoa ho ho ho, let’s talk about this, fellas. You don’t gotta do this.” And then he bribed the judge to call it off.