Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, and Kris Kringle. All different names of the beloved Santa Claus that delivers presents to every person on Earth, right? Wrong. Santa Claus is not real, but he was at one point in time.

There are multiple legends of our jolly, old fat man in red and white, but at least one holds some truth. The story is that a man with the name of Saint Nicholas was an extremely charitable man that one day decided to drop a bag of gold down a poor man’s chimney so that the man could afford his daughter’s marriage. The gold had incidentally fallen into a stocking that hung on the mantel, thus starting the popular gifts in stockings tradition. The man, filled with curiosity, watched over his chimney until St. Nicholas came back again and cornered St. Nicholas to confess. Soon word spread and people began doing what St. Nicholas did, except not with gold.

One thing you must remember is that same jolly man that goes down chimneys and eats the cookies you leave out isn’t real and it’s just the adults in your household playing the role of Santa Claus. That’s not so wrong though. The spirit of Santa Claus is in everyone the second they are born.

“I love Christmas a lot,” sophomore Sarah Boughner said, “and I guess Santa just goes hand-in-hand with it all. I don’t know if Christmas would be Christmas to me without the idea of Santa.”

Some say that the purpose of Santa is to teach kids to be good or bad things will happen. Others say Santa teaches kids to be kind to others.

“You should behave all the time,” sophomore Madison Rutan said,”not just around Christmas to get presents.”

People spanning from kids to the elderly all partake in getting gifts for their friends and family, but are they doing it out of a sense of obligation or because they just want to be kind to others? It’s a simple matter of how a person was raised to act and believe.

“I buy presents to make them feel special,” sophomore Erica Daris said, “and so they’ll get me something, too.”