Millions of Americans are now aware that the traditions of Christmas are under fire by committed secularists, people who do not want any public demonstration of spirituality.
Bill O'Reilly, FOX News
A towering moral figure, Bill O'Reilly defends Christmas from those evil secular forces who wish to strip it of its spiritual meaning. Of course he means its Christian meaning. He wants store clerks to say "Merry Christmas" instead of the more religiously neutral "Happy Holidays," and he wants Nativity scenes next to the animatronic elves and reindeer in shopping malls. Of course the real threat to the Christian Christmas is not a secular Christmas, it's a pagan Christmas. Fundamentalist Christians fear Santa Claus far more than multiculturalism.
Some fundamentalist TV preacher once did a Christmas show where he shot Santa onstage. Took out a gun and shot him. Defending his faith with a handgun, the preacher railed on about how this elf on steroids was stealing the glory that should rightly belong to the Christ Child. Of course the preacher was a bit confused, as many of his kind are, about history. Traditions swirled around the winter solstice across many peoples and for many centuries before organized Christianity tried to wipe them out or co-opt them. The Roman Saturnalia would look very familiar to us. Starting in mid-December revelers would party, gather with family and friends, get drunk, sing and dance, give alms to the poor, exchange gifts, and finally have a big blow out on December 25. Around the fourth or fifth century, early Christians put a veneer over the traditional revelries and called it their own. They kicked out the pagan pantheon headed by Saturn and kept all the rest.
But the veneer is very thin. Scratch the surface of Christian revisionism and the pagan roots to Christmas are quickly revealed. The tree, the lights, the drinking and dancing, the mistletoe -- none of these have a very Christian feel to them. And despite apocryphal stories of Martin Luther and Christmas trees, they have no real Christian origins either. Even the Nativity -- that grand package of Christian mysteries that O'Reilly and the like defend as the spiritual core of Christmas -- did not originate with the Christ. The pagan god Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25, heralded by angels, the whole bit, some 500 years before Jesus. But the king of them all is Santa Claus. While no one believes in tree sprites or Roman gods anymore, Santa Claus walks straight out of pagan mythology and into our TVs and malls, fat, jolly, and -- for children at least -- very real. (The probably fictional St. Nicholas is yet more post-hoc wallpaper.)
As they started having children, my liberal friends had very serious discussions about whether they would instruct their tots in the Santa mythology. This was not for religious objections, but rather because they would have to actively lie to their charges, something which to their credit they felt very uncomfortable about. People should feel uncomfortable about lying, and people should feel outraged when they find that they have been lied to. With respect to Santa Claus, however, I've never seen this to be the case. I've never known any child, including myself, who was crushed or felt betrayed to find out that Santa didn't really exist. On the contrary, older children embrace their superior knowledge and cooperate in indoctrinating the new generation of believers.
My 6-year-old daughter still believes in Santa Claus, and I assure her that he exists, but I can see the wheels turning. She wants to believe, but it's becoming harder for her. Meanwhile, Santa has served a very practical purpose. If all presents came from parents, then whining and pleading might have some effect, and we would have to endure a month of constant begging for whatever new toy showed up in the commercials on Nickelodeon. But since Santa is responsible for the big gifts we are spared the whining and are not responsible for any disappointment. But Santa is a benign force, even merciful. He rarely judges the child naughty, and he always brings something he thinks will be good, even if it's not exactly what the child wants. Did the Christ Child ever embody grace in so concrete a form?
Santa is a barometer of thought, and he evolves along with the child's ability to reason. In very young children there is no question of belief -- all their storybook creatures really exist somewhere, so meeting some at the mall is not particularly shocking. Slowly the distinction between fantasy and reality sharpens as magical thinking gives way to cause and effect, and the creatures of childhood mythology sort into their rightful place on the fantasy side of the line. In this way I feel that Santa serves a greater practical purpose as an inoculation against irrationality. Adults lie about the existence of this magic elf, and no matter how much they want to believe, children eventually come to see that he does not exist. And yet all the good things about Christmas remain despite that. Giving up Santa loses nothing, since the cheer, goodwill and joy all came from people we love in the first place.
- jack*
Well put, Jack. "He rarely judges the child naughty" is the part I especially like. No matter what they may have done during the year, and lord knows my kids get too many lectures where they walk away wondering if they're "good" kids, once a year, Santa arrives to give them a resounding message that they're on the "good" list. That message is there at church as well, but *hearing* about the prodigal son is very different from essentially *being* the prodigal son once a year...
Posted by: loyopp | December 24, 2004 at 07:33 AM
Merry Christmas to you and yours, Jack!!!
Posted by: bedrocktruth | December 25, 2004 at 09:38 AM