Holiday Calendar

National Nicholas Day

Next celebratedThursday, February 25, 2027

The story that Dutch settlers carried Sinterklaas to New Amsterdam and English speakers wore it down to Santa Claus has an author: a New York satirist who made it up. National Nicholas Day marks the name underneath.

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEFebruary 25
OBSERVED INUnited States
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

Nearly ten months from the saint's own feast.

No founder, establishment record, or documented reason for the February 25 date has been identified. The observance circulates on general-interest and holiday-listing sites, separately from the traditional Nicholas name day of December 6 or 19.

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INTRO

A Greek word for victory became Santa Claus

National Nicholas Day hands its honorees a name with a strange American afterlife. The version most people know goes like this: Dutch settlers carried Sinterklaas to New Amsterdam, and English speakers wore the name down to Santa Claus. Scholars find scant evidence that the Dutch colony kept St. Nicholas traditions at all.

The New Amsterdam stories have an author. A New York satirist made them up, and the emigrant ship with the saint's figurehead, the colony's feast day and the gifts down the chimney all trace back to his joke. Britannica still tells it the older way.

That is the name this observance puts on the calendar, and a great many Americans still answer to it. Social Security records count 904,284 boys named Nicholas over the last hundred years.

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ORIGINS

Nicholas Day history

INTRODUCTION

The name began as a piece of ordinary Greek optimism. Nikolaos joins nike, victory, to laos, people, two very common elements in the language, which is why Oxford's Lexicon of Greek Personal Names calls the pairing predictable.

It took an undocumented man to make it famous. Britannica states flatly that Nicholas's existence is not attested by any historical document, and that nothing certain is known of his life beyond a probable 4th-century bishopric at Myra in Lycia. The earliest surviving account of him is thought to date from at least a century after he is supposed to have lived.

CHAPTER 01

A saint with no paperwork and enormous reach

He was not a martyr, which is unusual for a major saint, and the catalogue of sources for his miracles in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca runs to twelve pages. In 1087 Italian sailors or merchants took his alleged remains out of Myra and shipped them to Bari. The Orthodox Church in America's own account of the raid names forty-seven armed men and a bribe of 300 gold coins the guards refused.

CHAPTER 02

How Sinterklaas became a New York argument

Oxford's lexicon traces the English name through Dutch, reading Sinterklaas as Sinter, for saint, welded onto the Dutch form of Nicholas. Its first American outing was political rather than devotional. In 1773 non-Dutch New York patriots founded the Sons of St. Nicholas as an anti-British answer to the English St. George societies.

Who turned that into Santa Claus is still argued. Charles W. Jones told the New-York Historical Society in 1953 that Washington Irving had done it single-handed, writing that without Irving there would be no Santa Claus.

Tom A. Jerman answered him in 2020. The gift-giving passages Jones leaned on appear only in Irving's 1812 edition, two years after the Dutch St. Nicholas poems they were supposed to have caused.

CHAPTER 03

What February 25 inherits

That whole argument sits nearly ten months away from this observance. The traditional name day for a Nicholas is December 6 in the Western calendar. Eastern churches keep it on December 19.

No founder, proclamation, or first observance has been located for the February 25 date, and the Federal Register carries nothing under the name. What the day inherits instead is the name, reshaped by every language it passed through.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Nicholas Day

LANGUAGE

A kindly saint and the devil ended up sharing one name.

The Oxford English Dictionary's first attestation of Old Nick for the devil comes from 1643. The dictionary calls the reason for the appellation obscure, which leaves a famously kindly saint and the devil sharing one name.

CUSTOM

Elsewhere a name day can outrank a birthday

In the countries that keep them, from Bulgaria to Sweden, name days are often the more important of the two celebrations. The custom developed in the Middle Ages and is still kept in both Orthodox and Catholic Europe, which is the tradition a February name day reaches for.

PILGRIMAGE

The relics are said to produce a liquid

Since the relics reached Bari in the eleventh century they have been reported to give off a sweet-smelling substance called the manna of St. Nicholas. It has been bottled and sold to pilgrims as a purported cure-all salve.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Nicholas Day by the Numbers

32nd
US boys' name rank, 1926-2025
6th
US boys' name rank, 1990s
103rd
US boys' rank so far, 2020-2025
348
Records in the Oxford Greek name lexicon

TIMELINE

Timeline

Sailors take the relics to Bari

Italian sailors or merchants removed the saint's alleged remains from Myra and shipped them to Bari.

Santa Claus first appears in print

Rivington's New-York Gazetteer printed the form St. a Claus on December 23, the earliest known American mention of the figure.

Irving publishes on St. Nicholas Day

Washington Irving's satirical Knickerbocker's History of New York appeared on St. Nicholas Day itself.

Gift visit moves to Christmas Eve

The Children's Friend, described as the first lithographed book in America, showed Sante Claus arriving by flying reindeer rather than on December 6.

An anonymous poem runs in Troy

The Troy Sentinel published An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas under an introduction its editor headed Sante Claus.

Relic dated to the fourth century

Oxford researchers radiocarbon-dated a hip-bone fragment attributed to the saint and placed it in the 4th century.

GOOD TO KNOW

Five men who carried the same name

Nicolas Breakspear

He became the first and only English pope in 1154, then gave the name up and reigned as Adrian IV.

Pope Nicholas V

He decided the papal manuscripts, grown from 350 to around 1,200 by his death in 1455, should be opened to scholars.

Nicolaus Copernicus

The astronomer is filed under three versions of one name: Nicolaus Copernicus, Mikołaj Kopernik and Nikolaus Kopernikus.

Nikola Tesla

Born in 1856 in what is now Croatia, the Serbian American inventor carried the South Slavic form of the name.

Nicholas II

The last Russian emperor, who reigned until 1917, was Nikolay Aleksandrovich at home.

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

Coca-Cola put Santa Claus in a red suit.

The truth

The company's own history page says Santa appeared in a red coat before Haddon Sundblom painted him in 1931, and a New York Times report from 1927 already described a standardized red-suited department-store Santa.

The myth

Nicholas struck the heretic Arius at the Council of Nicaea.

The truth

Britannica hedges both halves of the story, saying only that he may have attended the council in 325 and that he allegedly struck Arius in the face.

The myth

Thomas Nast's Santa was always the man in red.

The truth

Nast's first Harper's Weekly Santa, in 1863, wore stars and stripes and handed out presents at a Union army camp.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Nicholas Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Host the open house the honoree runs

A traditional name day is an open house where anyone may stop in without an invitation. The person being honored plans it and serves the guests, which is the reverse of a birthday.

LEARN

Learn to say Hronia Polla

Greek well-wishers greet a name-day honoree with Hronia Polla, meaning many years. Flowers, chocolates or wine are what the custom expects a guest to bring.

LOOK

Look the name up in the federal tables

The Social Security Administration publishes a public rank for the name in every decade. Its 1990s table shows where Nicholas peaked, and the neighbouring decades show how fast it moved.

GIVE

Give an anonymous gift the old way

A Nicholas legend has him leaving bags of gold as dowries for three girls. Handing something over without signing it is the part of that story anyone can copy.

COLLECT

Collect the spellings the name lost along the way

Before American English settled on Santa Claus it tried St. Aclaus, St. Iclaus, Sancte Klaas, St. Claas and Santeclaw. Reading the list out at the table is a decent party trick for a Nicholas.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Nicholas Day?

1 / 8

What two Greek words combine to make Nikolaos?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing on record, and a full-text search of the Federal Register returns no proclamation or federal notice under the name, so it is a normal working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

17sources
8primary records
7independently dated
Primary records
Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, University of Oxford2021
Nikolaos-Nicholas
Oxford's survey of the Greek name, its 348 records and its route into Santa Claus.
View source
US Social Security Administration2025
Top Names Over the Last 100 Years
Federal ranking of American given names for births from 1926 to 2025.
View source
US Social Security Administration2025
Popular Names of the 1990s
Decade table showing where the name stood at its American peak.
View source
US Social Security Administration2025
Popular Names of the 2020s
Partial decade table covering births from 2020 through 2025.
View source
Vatican Apostolic Library
History of the Vatican Library
The library's own account of Nicholas V opening the papal manuscripts to scholars.
View source
Orthodox Church in America
Translation of the relics of Saint Nicholas from Myra to Bari
The church's account of the 1087 raid, the refused bribe and the May 9 feast.
View source
The Coca-Cola Company
Five Things You Never Knew About Santa Claus and Coca-Cola
The company's own history, including its denial that it gave Santa the red coat.
View source
US Federal Register
Federal Register document search
Full-text search of federal documents, where the day's name returns nothing.
View source
Additional coverage
Encyclopaedia Britannica2026
St. Nicholas
Biography of the bishop of Myra, his feast dates, his relics and the manna.
View source
St. Nicholas Center
Saint Nicholas and the Origin of Santa Claus
Traces the American Santa from the Dutch saint and weighs the New Amsterdam evidence.
View source
St. Nicholas Center
Name Day Celebration, St. Nicholas
How name days are kept in Europe and Latin America, and on which dates.
View source
History News Network
Revisiting the Knickerbocker Origin Story of Santa Claus
Tom A. Jerman's case against the long-accepted claim that Irving invented Santa.
View source
New York Public Library2015
Santa's New York Roots
Reproduces the 1773 newspaper notice and the discarded early spellings of the name.
View source
Snopes2025
Coca-Cola didn't invent modern image of Santa Claus
Fact check tracing the red suit to illustrators working long before 1931.
View source
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Nicolaus Copernicus
Biography of the astronomer, listing three recorded forms of his own name.
View source
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Nikola Tesla
Biography of the Serbian American inventor born in what is now Croatia.
View source
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Nicholas II
Biography of the last Russian emperor, named Nikolay Aleksandrovich at home.
View source
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