The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Today is the feast day of St. Nicholas. The figure of Santa Claus comes from St. Nick, who in turn comes from the real-life St. Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop from Myra, in what is now Turkey. In many parts of the world, today is the day that children get gifts — on the evening of December 5th, they might put out shoes and get small gifts like fruit, coins, or toys.

On this day, two major publications were first released: the Encyclopedia Britannica and The Washington Post.

The Britannica was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment. The first installment came out on this day in 1768, and a new section was released every week. It was finally completed in 1771 and was several thousand pages long. The entry for "woman," in its entirety, read: " 'Female of Man' See HOMO."

The Washington Post came out on this day in 1877. It was four pages long and each letter was typeset by hand. It cost three cents.

It was on this day in 1947 that President Harry S. Truman dedicated the Everglades National Park, the most famous of Florida's wetlands. Standing on a palmetto-thatched platform, he addressed the crowd of 10,000: "Here is land, tranquil in its quiet beauty, serving not as the source of water, but as the last receiver of it. To its natural abundance we owe the spectacular plant and animal life that distinguishes this place from all others in our country."

The Everglades was the first national park dedicated solely for its biological diversity, hosting 400 species of birds alongside panthers, pompano, and such remarkable creatures as the Florida applesnail mollusk, lake chubsucker fish, and eastern pondhawks, an unusual species of dragonfly. It is home to the strangler fig, pond apple, and gumbo-limbo trees.

The Everglades is the country's third-largest national park, behind Yellowstone and Death Valley, and encompasses a million and a half acres between Miami, Key Largo, and Naples. In his address, President Truman declared, "For conservation of the human spirit, we need places such as Everglades National Park ... here we may draw strength and peace of mind from our surroundings."

It's the birthday of lyricist Ira Gershwin, born Israel Gershowitz in New York City (1896). When Ira was 21, he was working in his father's Turkish bath business, while his younger brother George was already making it big in Tin Pan Alley. When an acquaintance gave Ira yet another newspaper clipping about George's success, Ira responded: "I now belong, I see, to the rank of Brothers of the Great."

Ira Gershwin wrote:

"I fetch his slippers, fill up the pipe he smokes
I cook the kippers, laugh at his oldest jokes
Yet here I anchor, I might have had a banker
Boy! what love has done to me"

Ethel Merman sang it in the 1930 musical Girl Crazy.

It was on this day in 1953 that Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov finished the final draft of his novel Lolita in Ithaca, New York, where he was a professor at Cornell College (books by this author). An accomplished lepidopterist, he had begun the novel five years earlier while collecting butterflies in the western United States.

Several months before the book's publication, Nabokov and his wife, Vera, had originally intended to summer in southeastern Arizona, near the Chiricahua Mountains, but poor butterfly-collecting weather and the arrival of rattlesnakes at their doorstep drove them to rent a modest house in Ashland, Oregon. Nabokov did not type or write his novels longhand; he wrote ideas, scenes, quotes, and snatches on index cards and then dictated to his wife, who typed the manuscript. Nabokov called her, "The best-humored woman I know." The relative isolation of Ashland proved fruitful for Nabokov; he walked almost 18 miles every day, looking for butterflies and composing the book in his head.

When Lolita was first published in London in 1955, the book's first printing sold out. The London Sunday Times named it one of the three best books of 1955, prompting the editor of London's Sunday Express to respond that Lolita was "the filthiest book I have ever read." When published in the U.S. in 1958, Lolita became the first book since Gone With the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks.

Lolita is the story of middle-aged Humbert Humbert and his sexual obsession with 12-year-old Dolores "Lolita" Haze. About Lolita, Nabokov said, "There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet." He called Humbert Humbert "a vain and cruel wretch." The word "Lolita" entered the pop culture lexicon as a name for a sexually precocious young girl, though Nabokov did not approve of the American pronunciation. He said, "It should not be ... Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy 'L' and long 'o.' No, the first syllable should be as in 'lollipop,' the 'L' liquid and delicate, the 'lee' not too sharp." The book earned so much money that Nabokov retired from his teaching post at Cornell and moved to the Montreaux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he lived until his death in 1977.