I hear curious rumblings this time of year among Christians that letting children believe in Santa is wrong. That giving children a myth implies that the Nativity story is insufficient. That letting them believe that good behavior earns gifts makes them greedy or legalistic. That belief in Santa means bowing to materialism and all things plastic.
But what if Christians embraced the Father Christmas myth while rejecting the materialism attached to it? Myths, after all, are time-honored methods of communicating truth through story, and the Santa Claus myth is no exception. (Please, don't tell me his name is an anagram for Satan. Santa comes from the Latin sanctus, meaning holy or saint. Santa's name likely evolved from a real person, Nicholas, a Christian man whose extreme generosity helped strangers.) I'd like to propose that teaching children about Santa Claus does not conflict with teaching them about Jesus. In fact, I propose that the Nativity story and the Santa myth may have more in common than we're prone to believe.
Some stories, such as fables and parables, are not empirically true, but they are true in that they point to realities about God's world and the human condition. Some stories are empirically true and also communicate this kind of truth. The Nativity story is a perfect example of the latter. The Santa Claus myth is a great example of the former. Santa Claus embodies Christian values such as kindness, generosity, forgiveness—every child soon realizes that even if they have not been perfect all year, Santa comes through. Santa brings gifts to children both deserving and undeserving. While Santa is not a Christ figure—that must be clear—the Santa myth is not the problem. The problem is that we have let advertisers hijack Santa, turning Christmas into a retail event.
Obviously, leading your kids to believe that their wish list is a demand list, or focusing exclusively on Santa, or using it to threaten or manipulate your children, is unhelpful. But allowing children to embrace Santa while they are young can allow them to experience unmerited favor (grace). We can, as they grow, point to that experience in order to explain what it means to give and receive grace. Rather than replace fairy tales with rational, hard facts ("There is no such thing as Santa. He does not exist!"), why not tell your children the tales of Father Christmas or St. Nicholas, someone who gives without expecting anything in return, who loves children—and who brings you one gift, not 30?
C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century, dedicated the Chronicles of Narnia to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield. In the dedication, he noted that "girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales …. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."
Many of us have grown too old for fairy tales, yet not matured enough to understand them as adults. And we steal something precious from our children when we deny them the opportunity to believe in fairy tales, and to learn how to glean truth from a made-up story. To believe, for a little while, allows them to later understand symbolism and metaphor. And as growing children question the veracity of the story, let them research the stories and real people (like St. Nicholas) whom the myth is based on. They can compare and contrast Jesus and St. Nick.
Christmas is the day we celebrate the birth of Jesus, who brought us the best gift of all: eternal life. And certainly, we need to tell our children first and foremost that Christmas celebrates the Son of God arriving to earth (Our family even baked him a birthday cake!). But other Christmas traditions—from the tree to the turkey dinner to Santa—can also enrich and bless a family's holiday. By using a myth of a loving person who brings you a gift you did not earn, we allow them to experience a parable they can understand when they grow older. They will learn about all generosity by being the recipient of generosity.
Lewis (who, by the way, included Father Christmas in one of his Narnia books) often corresponded with readers. One youngster, 9-year-old Laurence Krieg, confessed to his mother that he might love Aslan the Lion more than he loved Jesus, and felt guilty about this. His mother wrote to the publisher, and Lewis himself responded in less than two weeks.
"Tell Laurence from me, with my love," Lewis wrote, " … [He] can't really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that's what he is doing. For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps loving Him more than he ever did before … I don't think he need be bothered at all."
Lewis's answer is brilliant. God made our imaginations and hardwired us to connect deeply with stories. Jesus himself appealed to people's imagination by telling parables—stories that communicated profound truths. Even if stories are fairy tales, and therefore not empirically true, they still communicate truth. Smart parents will use the Santa myth to teach their children to be giving rather than demanding, and to experience generosity and grace.
Keri Wyatt Kent is the author of several books on Christian spirituality, most recently Making Room for God in Your Hectic Life, and has written for several websites and magazines, including Christianity Today. A member of the Redbud Writers Guild, she and her husband Scot have been married for 17 years and live with their son and daughter in Illinois.
A few years ago, a little movie called The Ultimate Gift didn’t get much attention, but it was one of my favorite “hidden gems” of 2006. The film starred Abigail Breslin (now carrying one of the main roles in My Sister’s Keeper) as a young girl dying of cancer, part of the plot about a young man who had a lot to learn about what really matters in life.
Cheryl McKay, the screenwriter of that film, has written her next screenplay, Never the Bride, which has also been turned into a novel just released by WaterBrook Press. The film adaptation is scheduled to release sometime in 2010.
A few months ago, my friend Stephanie’s grandma was diagnosed with a brain tumor. In spite of brain surgery and chemotherapy, the tumor has grown, and her grandma is now on hospice. When I had coffee with Stephanie recently, I asked her when she’d seen her grandma last. She told me it had been a few weeks. She said it was too overwhelming to see her grandma suffering and not be able to intervene.
“I don’t know what to do, so I don’t do anything,” she said. “What do you think?”
I have not faced anything as serious as what Stephanie’s family is going through, but I’ve had similar questions about a family of Somali refugees I’ve been working with here in Portland. Sometimes I’m encouraged by how far they’ve come, and other times I’m discouraged by how far they still have to go. Sometimes I’m so overwhelmed, I avoid visiting the family because it’s too difficult to engage in a problem that I cannot solve completely.
And then I think about something my mom likes to say, that God made us human beings, not human doers. Life is about who we are being and who we are becoming, not so much about what we are able to accomplish.
The more I’ve worked with the refugee family, the more I’ve learned that not only do I need to be as an individual; I need to learn how to be with others—not to fix or change or cure them, but to be with them where they are.
So when Stephanie asked me what I thought she should do, I told her, “Your grandma doesn’t need you to cure her. She needs you to be with her. She needs you to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, holding her hand.”
I told myself the same thing about the Somali family. I cannot give them everything they need, but I can sit with them in their cold apartment. I can eat rice with them from a bowl on the floor. And at night when the children are huddled together on a stack of mattresses, I can rub their backs and sing to them until they fall asleep.
Last year my friend Karen Spears Zacharias wrote a book called Will Jesus Buy Me A Double-Wide? In it, she tells the story of a Marine who had completed his military career and then gave up everything he had to work with homeless people in North Carolina.
He and his friends were able to get a woman off the street and into her own apartment. But all the money she had went toward paying the rent; there was no money left over for her bills. One day she came to the Marine and told him she needed help paying for her electricity. “You have to help me,” she pleaded. “If I can’t pay the bill, they’ll come turn off the lights.”
Replete of personal resources, the Marine told her, “I can’t pay your bill, but I can promise you this. On the day they turn off your lights, I will come over and sit with you in the dark.”
The Book of Job tells the story of a man who had everything—a wife, children, money, real estate—and in one day, lost everything but his wife and his life. And his wife wasn’t that helpful. When she saw how much physical and emotional pain Job was in, she told him to curse God and die. Instead of cursing God, Job took his sorrows and sat alone in a garbage heap, scraping his boil-ridden skin with glass shards to try to dull the pain.
Three of Job’s friends came to visit him while he was trying to live through the pain of unspeakable losses. They came to him and sat with him in silence for a while. And then, unfortunately, they opened their mouths.
They accused Job of having hidden sins, reasoning he must be doing something wrong to have incurred God’s wrath. In the end, God chastised the friends for their advice. Their mistake was not in showing up when Job was hurting; it was in assuming they needed to correctly diagnose and fix their hurting friend.
The Book of Job is not only a lesson in how to relate to a God we sometimes cannot understand. It’s also a lesson in how to relate to someone who’s enduring life-threatening, heartbreaking pain. Rather than teaching us the “right” words to say or “right” ways to fix broken hearts, it teaches us that sometimes the best thing we can do for a hurting soul is to be present with them. And to keep silent.
This week, Stephanie went over to her grandma’s house. She lay next to her grandma in bed and held her hand. She got to tell her grandma how much she loved her. She got to say goodbye.
The next night, when Stephanie got word that her grandma had slipped into a coma, I went over and sat with her while she grieved the loss. And when she had run out of tears, I sat on her bed and read her Psalms until she fell asleep.
Sitting in the dark is not only the purest way we can love each other; it’s the way that God loved us. He sent Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” Emmanuel ventured into the darkness and was not afraid to eat with prostitutes or let unruly children sit in his lap or touch contagious lepers. He did not come at us or to us; he came to be with us.
And now we get to be with each other. We get to engage in others’ problems and pain. We get to keep them company in their darkness. We get to be, even when there’s nothing we can do but sit in the dark.
Sarah Thebarge lives and practices medicine in Portland, Oregon. She writes at My Tropic of Cancer and the Burnside Writers Collective, and has written for us about having breast cancer at age 27. She has also written for CT’s This Is Our City project.
Here’s how McKay, a Christian, describes the storyline in a recent interview: “It’s about a girl, Jessie Stone, who accuses God of being asleep on the job of setting up her love story. God shows up to face the charges. He tells Jessie that he can’t write her story until she surrenders the pen. The purple pen she’s clutched for many years, penning her own ideas for how her love life should go in her 109 journals. The story is a tug-of-war between God and Jessie and who is really writing this story. Is she too afraid to trust God because he may not write what she truly wants? Or can she surrender that pen to God and let him write the best love story for her?”
