During World War II, Mr Haugland was member of the Norwegian resistance movement.

He was honoured by Britain for his role in helping to disrupt Nazi plans to create nuclear weapons.

This may come as a surprise. How can Macchietti's Mr Goldenballs, with his gilt sandals and curly, glowing hair, be related to roly-poly, red-faced Santa Claus? For starters, he's too thin. And beardless. He is dressed like an inhabitant of the Mediterranean, not Lapland. He is standing by the window, not peering down the chimney. And, anyway, where's his retinue of reindeer?

But, then, this is one of the sad truths at the heart of Christmas present. These days, it isn't only the birth of Christ that is threatened with oblivion. The charitable St Nicholas, associated with Christmas since time immemorial, is rapidly sliding towards anonymity, too. Meanwhile, the stock of his more recent incarnation as Santa Claus, the darling of department-store managers, filmmakers and advertising copy-writers the world over, continues to rise.

Canon James Rosenthal, who has earned a reputation as one of the Church's leading authorities on St Nicholas, believes it's time that the "real" Father Christmas is remembered.

"I always think it's sad that people are ignorant of the origins of our customs," he says. "Santa Claus is fine, but St Nicholas is so much better. Like us, he is real.

"I believe there is a bit of St Nicholas in all of us. For Christians, he is a model to push chubby Santa back into fairyland."

St Nicholas's standing is currently so low that Canon Rosenthal was recently banned from visiting children held at an immigration centre in Bedfordshire. When he arrived at Yarl's Wood, dressed as St Nicholas, wearing a magnificent fake white beard and a bishop's mitre, he had hoped to deliver presents donated by the congregations of several London churches. But he was turned away by security guards, who eventually called the police. "I felt like a criminal for trying to spread cheer and a few gifts," Canon Rosenthal told me this week.

St Nick must have been a pretty impressive figure to inspire such devotion, but, in truth, few facts about him are known. He was probably born around AD 260 in the port of Patara on the southern coast of what was then Asia Minor, now Turkey. He grew up in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire, which was still hostile to Christianity, but found himself drawn to the new religion, and rose to become the bishop of Myra, now the Lycian town of Demre. He died in Myra in 343, possibly on December 6 (the date on which he is usually venerated today).

"The first Life of St Nicholas is from the 9th century," says Robin Cormack, professor emeritus of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and an expert on Byzantium. "Maybe St Nicholas was a bishop in the 4th century AD; all else seems fiction."

But what fiction! Scintillating legends quickly gathered around the memory of Myra's bishop, who acquired a reputation for generosity. Aside from rescuing the daughters of the impoverished nobleman in Macchietti's picture, he is said to have resurrected three boys who had been killed by a psychotic butcher, who'd chopped them up, salted their remains in a barrel, and planned to sell their cured body parts as ham during a period of famine.

Over the centuries, St Nicholas evolved into the patron saint of sailors and fishermen, pawnbrokers, children, scholars, druggists – and even people being mugged.

By the 10th century, a basilica containing his relics had been built at Myra. In those days, the remains of holy figures were big business, since thousands of pilgrims flocked to shrines all over Europe. In 1087, a bunch of brigands from the Italian port of Bari on the Adriatic Sea set sail for Myra, where they looted the basilica, before returning home with the exhumed remains of St Nick. A shrine was quickly established back in Italy, and people flocked to Bari to peddle the holy "manna" which was said to drip from the saint's bones.

The arrival of St Nicholas in Italy accounts for his popularity among Italian artists of the Renaissance. Fra Angelico and Masaccio both depicted the saint in altarpieces. Veronese painted the saint, with a white beard, in a grand canvas from 1562 that can be seen in the National Gallery.

St Nicholas was soon venerated across Europe. He was especially beloved in Holland, where, to this day, children receive gifts on the Feast of St Nicholas rather than Christmas Day. The tangerines traditionally left as gifts in the stockings of children who have been good allude to St Nicholas's emblem – three balls of gold.

His transformation into Father Christmas only occurred after the Dutch had emigrated to North America in the 17th century. In the New World, they continued to observe the feast day of Sinterklaas, as they called St Nicholas. This dialectical quirk became "Santa Claus".

Most of Santa Claus's current iconography – the flowing beard, red-and-white livery, reindeer – dates from 19th-century America, where the traditions of the early Dutch settlers were fondly recalled. Clement C Moore's poem The Night Before Christmas, published anonymously in 1823, cemented the image of Father Christmas in the popular imagination as a jolly old soul with a white beard who arrives through chimneys to deliver gifts into stockings, before riding off into the night on a sleigh laden with toys and powered by prancing reindeer.

The New York caricaturist Thomas Nast later refined our image of Father Christmas, fattening him up in a series of cartoons that appeared in Harper's Weekly from 1863 onwards. Nast was also responsible for changing the colour of Santa's cloak from tan or green to red, decades before the Coca-Cola advertising campaigns of the mid-20th century, featuring Swedish artist Haddon Sundblom's vision of Father Christmas swigging from a bottle of Coke. The first of these ads appeared in 1931, marking a watershed in St Nicholas's transformation from icon of Christian self-sacrifice to the plump, friendly face of yuletide capitalism.

The question remains why it was specifically St Nicholas, rather than any other saint, who became indelibly linked with Christmas. For Canon Rosenthal, the answer is simple. "St Nicholas hit all the right chords in the hearts, minds and imaginations of the people," he says. "He went to prison for his faith, he smashed pagan altars, he gave away his wealth, and he even restored three boys to life. Not bad for one person."

But Prof Cormack is not so sure. "No one understands the reason for the popularity of St Nicholas," he says. "All the stories [associated with him] are conventional saints' stuff. He just got lucky."

The anticipated timing of Obama's order was disclosed by a government official familiar with the planning who requested anonymity in order to discuss the order before its release. A draft of the order leaked last summer.

The still-classified Cold War records would provide a wealth of data on U.S.-Soviet relations, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, diplomacy and espionage. A Soviet spy ring in the Navy led by John Walker headlined 1985, which became known as "The Year of the Spy."

It took 19 years and a lawsuit for the National Security Archive, a private group that obtains and analyzes once-secret government records, to get documents on the 1959 crisis when the United States and the Soviet Union faced off over control of West Berlin. For nearly two decades, the contested documents were shuttled back and forth among various offices in the Defense Department, then on to the State Department and an unnamed intelligence agency, each conducting a separate declassification review, before the government finally gave some of them up.

An open government
Obama's executive order will follow on the president's inauguration day initiatives on open government. On his first day in office, Obama instructed federal agencies to be more responsive to requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act and he overturned an order by President George W. Bush that would have enabled former presidents and vice presidents to block release of sensitive records of their time in the White House.

William J. Bosanko, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, says the classification policies in place under executive orders signed by Bush and President Bill Clinton have protected national security and enabled increased declassification.

But Obama's review is necessary to enhance security and increase declassification "to a level that our open society expects and deserves," Bosanko said.

Obama's executive order "is an experiment, but it just might work," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "By changing the rules about what gets classified, this could lead to a dramatic reduction in secrecy throughout the government." Aftergood obtained a leaked copy of an early draft of the executive order last summer.

The government spent more than $8.21 billion last year to create and safeguard classified information, and $43 million to declassify it, according to the oversight office, part of the National Archives and Records Administration. The figures don't include data from the principal intelligence agencies, which is classified.

"What we're seeking to do is come up with a system that refocuses the finite resources available," says Bosanko.

"Serial reviews" are among the requirements causing declassification delays that can take years to resolve. When a classified document contains secrets from multiple agencies, each agency must review its part, a process that can add years to the declassification process.

In 2000, Clinton gave agencies a three-year extension to complete a review of multiple-agency classified records. When it became clear that the deadline wouldn't be met, Bush in 2003 gave federal agencies a six-year extension.

Declassification spending was cut from an average of $224 million annually in the last four years of the Clinton administration to only $47 million a year during the last four years of the Bush administration.

Today, the problem is not much closer to being solved than it was in the 1990s. Under the terms of Bush's extension, sensitive information in hundreds of millions of pages of historical documents will be declassified automatically on Dec. 31 unless Obama acts.

"If the agencies haven't found the sensitive old documents after nine years, that's some indication those records don't deserve being secret anymore," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive.

Centralizing process
Obama's order probably will centralize the review process for old records, having all agencies look at the same classified documents at the same time through the new National Declassification Center. Michael Kurtz, who has been with the National Archives for the past 35 years, has been chosen as the center's acting director.

Much of the work of a National Declassification Center probably would be conducted at the National Archives facility in College Park, Md., where many of the documents are housed and many of the agency declassifiers already spend a great deal of time.

Critics say Obama should do more than the upcoming executive order is likely to. They note that Clinton ordered a "bulk declassification" of millions of records from World War II and before; they want Obama to do the same with Cold War-era records.

The premise of bulk declassification is that "we're not going to spend taxpayer dollars to go through these records one by one," said William Leonard, Bosanko's predecessor as Information Security Oversight Office director.

And the planned National Declassification Center, said Leonard, should have authority to decide the status of millions of classified records on its own.

"We shouldn't need multiple opinions from multiple agencies," said Leonard.

But intelligence agencies have resisted surrendering their authority over secrets to an interagency group.