About 700 years ago, a bronze ring depicting St. Nicholas — the saint who inspired the modern-day figure of Santa Claus — slipped off the finger of its owner, likely either a crusader or a pilgrim traveling to the Holy Land. The ring lay buried in the dirt for hundreds of years, until a gardener in Israel found it last week while weeding in Lower Galilee. The gardener, Dekel Ben-Shitrit, 26, turned the unusual ring over to Israel's National Treasures Department, where archaeologists dated the metal artifact to between the 12th and 15th centuries, during the Middle Ages. [The Holy...
