I didn’t say thor was German.

I would encourage a search of “Santa Claus” and “Thor,” since it shows a very interesting link between characters of what we call “paganism” and the Santa Claus/St Nicholas figure. Thor, the God of Thunder and Lightening ( Donner and Blitzen) and Thor, the God who drove a sleigh drawn by two goats, Cracker and Gnasher. Many of these characters, Thor, Odin, the German mountain man, are mythologies outside of Christianity.

I did a search of Krampus (who is every bit as interesting and more than St Nick) and the Germans/Austrians who run sites such as krampus.com agree that the origin of Santa belongs to the hearth-god (chimneys) Thor.

A search I did of St Nicholas himself led to arguments that the stories of St Nicholas correspond so well to the God Poseidon, that most of what we “know” about the saint is wrong. I would hardly want to suggest that any relic is the genuine article, and neither would I legends about St Nick himself, several which have been utterly debunked.

One great book to read would be “The Battle for Christmas,” which outlines the history of Christmas in America. It does not always go in great detail about mythological origins, but does shed light on what the heck Americans are doing with such pagan traditions.

I’d like to recommend the wiki on Santa Claus. Pretty good stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_claus

A really well-documented article (among several articles about Christmas traditions) comes from the massive site Religious Tolerance.org, which always lists its sources:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/santa1.htm

An interesting quote from that article:

“Some religious historians and experts in folklore believe that there is no valid evidence to indicate that St. Nicholas ever existed as a human. In fact, there are quite a few indicators that his life story was simply recycled from those of Pagan gods. Many other ancient Pagan gods and goddesses were similarly Christianized in the early centuries of the Church. His legends seems to have been mainly created out of myths attributed to the Greek God Poseidon, the Roman God Neptune, and the Teutonic God Hold Nickar. “In the popular imagination [of many Russians] he became the heir of Mikoula, the god of harvest, ‘who will replace God, when God becomes too old.’ ” 8″

Anyway, I can’t say I’m an expert, but I’ve been fascinated by this subject for many years (about 30). I’ve read quite a bit on the subject, and every damned year I learn something new about Christmas origins that I just hadn’t come across before. Goes to show that our knowledge on some subjects represents a certain-sized window that may continue to open–for instance, I learned about Krampus only two years ago–if anything is interesting about Christmas, it’s this. It’s both pagan and very, very Christian–which, it seems, is just as “pagan” a religion as any other. Wonders never cease!

I’m sure you’d get something, but probably in a different way then what you want : ).