There really are 12 days of Christmas — it begins on Dec. 25 and ends on Jan. 5. And there really is a Santa Claus — it’s a long story including a reconstructed face by Caroline Wilkinson, a facial anthropologist at the University of Manchester in England (National Geographic, Dec. 20, 2013).

Saint Nicholas was born in Greece and became the bishop of Myra in modern-day Turkey. Two stories from his life made him the patron saint of children and gift giving. The first story has the bishop anonymously giving three bags of gold to an indebted father as a dowry for his three daughters, saving them from a life of prostitution. The second story has three boys being murdered and “buried” in barrels in a basement. The bishop discovered the crime and resurrected the three boys.

For several hundred years, St. Nicholas’ life was celebrated with a feast day on Dec. 6, later moved to Dec. 25. When his burial place was repaired in the 1950’s, his remains were carefully documented using x-rays and measurements. Those records were used by Caroline Wilkinson to re-create his face, including a broken nose suffered during the persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor Diocletian.

And there really is a God. The two small churches in my “circuit” have read through the Bible during the past year using the Daily Walk Bible. From Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, we’ve read the story of a God who created, then lost, and then reached out to his creation to bring them back into his kingdom.

Now, during the new year, we’ll go back through the Bible and talk about the “absolute basics of the Christian faith.”

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning — the first day (Genesis 1:1-5).”

Maybe you noticed, the Bible simply states the obvious, “In the beginning God!” Nowhere in the Bible does anyone try to prove God’s existence. It’s a given, as though the authors cannot comprehend how anyone could question God’s existence. The psalmist said, “How clearly the sky reveals God’s glory! How plainly it shows what he has done (Psalm 19)!”