The truth about the holidays, for non-believers.

On a quiet morning a thousand years or so ago, three ships set out from a small seaside village in Southeast Italy. They were on a secret mission from God. Their objective: to rescue a holy man from certain destruction by bandits!

The holy man had been dead for centuries.

Hundreds of years before that, the holy man had lived in the area, performing many miracles. One of those was rumored to be calming the stormy seas, and sailors ever since remembered his name and called to him when they were frightened by the storms.

Another story had him saving kidnapped children. In still another, he gave presents to those in need. He was both a saint and a hero.

But now he was in peril, in a way. His remains were in peril, although it might not look that way to the untrained eye. The place where he was buried had become a great chapel. He was visited from far and wide.

Making a big deal out of old holy dead dudes probably seems a bit strange to us today, but it didn't back then. Back then, dead people made a pretty good living.

Why? It had to do with Christianity becoming wildly successful. For the first couple of centuries after Christianity started, nobody was a tourist. Nobody collected religious stuff. Where was Jesus born? What happened to the cup he drank from that last night? Who washed his socks? These were questions that a slave religion did not concern itself with. They just wanted to get by.

But slowly, over time the new religion took off. There were bishops and networks of churches. Roman emperor Constantine decided to become a Christian. After that, his wife famously goes on vacation to the Mideast. She wants to know where all of these things happened. After all, these things she had heard and read about were very important to her. She was curious about visiting the places, breathing that air, touching those stones. Where was Noah's Ark? Where was the Sermon on the Mount preached? Where was Jesus born?

There were rumors. But heck, it had been 300 years or more. It wasn't like there were road signs or some library or Wikipedia to use to look things up. But then, something really strange happened. As it turns out, if really rich people show up with a lot of questions wanting to spend a bunch of money in the local economy? People have answers!

And so, holy places became places to visit. One might even say tourist traps. There were all kinds of holy places. Over the next 700 years, more and more places were discovered to have been related to things in the holy texts. They used to say that you didn't have a proper church in any town in Europe if you didn't have a piece of the one true cross. The cross thing sort of ran out. People figured that you couldn't have a forest full of trees all claiming to be part of the cross, so they switched to dead people.

Why dead people? Why not? If they were famous, they already had really great stories told about them, and it was always easy to add some more. Their bodies didn't decay. They could fly! They saved a country from giant squirrels. That kind of thing. The bodies of really holy people were said to excrete a magical liquid that smelled like roses and could heal the sick.

From far off, people saw the church with this one dead guy from 700 years ago and thought: he'd be great to have in our church. And after a bit of thought, they finally realized: there are horrible things happening in the area where his body was held. Rumors were that foreign band of raiders pillaged the area, threatening to harm him or even take or destroy his remains and his chapel. What a horrible loss it would be if something happened to the guy.

The people back in Italy heard about this and were quite concerned. They just couldn't sit around.

It was especially important to do something for this dead guy. This guy was top-drawer, first-string talent. The guys looked around. Thousands of churches had been built in his name -- 300 in Belgium alone. Christianity had split into two groups that didn't get along, but heck, both groups liked the guy. (Being dead for hundreds of years probably helped) He was the Elvis of holy dead dudes for a lot of Christians. Somebody needed to make Graceland. Somebody needed to be sure he was properly protected.

So as the brave rescuers sailed their three ships sailed into Myra's harbor, they knew they were on a sacred mission. A mission from God. They had to save the saint. Bring his body back to their home where they could tend to it, make sure it was unmolested, and be visited by people wanting to see the man. People looking for miracles. People wanting to renew their faith.

People with money.

Oddly, the monks who lived in the chapel, who protected the saint, however, weren't really concerned about danger from local raiders. Local raiders weren't that big of a deal. In fact, strange reasons, they were more concerned about bandits showing up in ships with flimsy excuses trying to steal the holy man's bones. They were sitting pretty and they had a feeling that couldn't last. They had the whole guy. The big honcho. Some churches only had a toenail of a obscure friar or something. These monks knew they had a good thing when they saw it. They were raking it in while they could.

As they worshiped that day, forty-seven heavily-armed Italians left the three raggedy ships and strode into their church, asking the monks to see the saint's body. But the monks weren't idiots. They wanted to know what the heck was going on. Why would so many armed men need to see some long-dead dude? Who are you guys?

(I imagine at this point the leader saying something like "We're worried about him! Just think! Armed men could show up!" )

We'll never know exactly what was said but we know that pretending to be friends got old in a hurry, so the armed men decided to just tie up the monks to get them to shut up and stay out of the way. They found the corpse, "rescued" it, took some other things from the tomb and church, then made it out of town just barely ahead of an angry mob. (Led by the monks, I would presume)

Yay! The holy man had been saved! Also some other precious artifacts. It was a great rescue mission. Mission accomplished. Thank goodness they were able to do something.

They made it home safely, then put all the precious things away safely in their own place. It was a place where people could come and visit, located in the center of town with good access and a natural picturesque setting. I picture a church surrounded by photo booths, taco stands, guided tour signs, and people dressed in period costumes. If there had been a Yelp back in the day, this place would have easily gotten five-stars.

But while location is king, marketing is also important, so everywhere the sailors went they spoke of the holy man, his great deeds, the power of his remains. The old dead holy dude was already crazy popular. This marketing effort took him to the next level. In time, people all over the Mediterranean, of all religions, knew about him. They knew of his stories and of the power his remains had. As the European nations took over most of the world, he became part of a common mythos of mankind.

But as famous as he was, these things fade over time, and such it was with our dead hero.

Seven hundred years later, on a continent not even known back in the day, a guy who liked writing little stories about history and such -- which is the chosen work of the pure -- was having problems building an audience in some faraway and exotic place called New York city. They needed to popularize this place, convince more people to live here. Get people talking. Spread the word. The local historical society had an idea: how about writing about history? People love that stuff.

Well, let's face it, history can be kind of boring, and good storytellers never let the facts get in the way of a good story. What if he just made stuff up? Pretended as if it were history? People are stupid, they wouldn't know. If he made up a good enough story, they'd be talking about it for centuries.

So he writes a book about the early settlers of New York. But he does not publish it. That's just what they were expecting. Nope. Instead he creates a bunch of sock puppets (fake names) and writes letters to the newspaper claiming that a long-lost manuscript had just been discovered about the stories of the early settlers, written by one of them! It was a secret, being kept from people, a secret so important that ...

It was a brilliant marketing campaign. By the time the book was "allowed" to be seen by the public, everybody wanted it. They wanted to know how the city had came to be. What was the true story? What were officials keeping secret? And since our writer had only a passing relationship with facts, and since this dead holy guy from long ago made for such a great story anyway and had mostly been forgotten? He was perfect.

It was a reboot. He had our saint, already one of his favorites, showing up in one of the "true" stories, arriving in a wagon and using a magic pipe to show the early settlers the great city New York would become one day. (One wonders exactly how this magic pipe worked or what he was smoking in it)

The story had a good run, and the riff on ancient holy dudes was an excellent touch and great angle, but it didn't completely take off. Our writer went on to write other "true" stories of the old days combined with all sorts of nonsense. There were men who slept for hundreds of years, headless horsemen, and even the great man Christopher Columbus. This writer was the first of many great American writers to come.

And there the story might have ended.

But one of his fans, loving all of his work (Poe was a huge fan of the guy too), just had to do his own riff off of the master, try to make a great story even better. The writer picked out the story he liked the most, the one with the odd holy guy and the magic pipe, then went on a sleigh ride in the country trying to figure out how spice up a reboot of the reboot.

He thought it through. First of all, this couldn't be a Catholic thing, with some famous holy guy showing up to perform miracles on Christmas Day. No. No. Too ethnic. Instead, he chose to move it back day, make him show up on Christmas Eve -- which nobody cared about. And we'll take the wagon out. Make it a sleigh. And no horses. Let's use reindeer. Let's make the guy a midget. We can leave the magic powers in, though. The pipe was a nice touch. We'll keep that. Maybe he can fly in and out of houses.

But why would people care about him? Would he help sailors? No, that's not going to work. He liked kids, right? So let's have him show up to do something .... nice ... with kids. Maybe give them stuff. How about presents? Who doesn't like presents?

So the fan-writer finishes his mental pitch session, cuts out a first draft of a poem, and sends it to the local paper. Anonymously. After all, he was a professor of literature! This was just fun stuff. Nobody took this stuff seriously, did they?

People loved it. They loved it so much that by the time our professor decided to admit he was the writer, at least seven other people had already claimed the job. There was a great marketing opportunity here, you see, and a fantastic merchandising tie-in. Already they were talking about adding a headquarters and a world-wide intelligence operation.

And now you know the real story of Santa Claus.

The story continues, of course, with later publishers changing the words of the poem "No, no. Not Happy Christmas. Let's make it Merry Christmas!", adding in a glow-in-the-dark reindeer, getting rid of the pipe, and sticking copies of him in department stores worldwide, having him ring bells.

But way, way back, a thousand years ago, after being robbed by a hoard of strangers, there were these monks were looking around an empty church wondering "What the heck happened?" These monks probably also asked "Doesn't anybody care about the truth here? Doesn't anybody care about the deeper meaning to all of this?"

They probably had a great story, but nobody remembers them today.

After Santa became famous, the aliens came, and Santa had his best elves make him into a giant half-cyborg and used his laser vision .. but that's another true story entirely. They don't want you to know about that one.