St. Nicholas

Advent and Christmas are always interesting times for parents. The world around us is skipping over Advent and moving along to Christmas. And forgive me for talking about Christmas at the beginning of Advent in this Pondering, but the topic is spurred on by the Feast Day of St. Nicholas (Dec. 6th). How do we as parents and as a Church help our children to follow the Church calendar? I wrestle with how to promote a godly view of St. Nicholas, while still allowing the children to enter into a mystical world greater than what can be observed by the naked eye. In the children’s movie Polar Express, the conductor, played by Tom Hanks, says “Seeing is believing, but sometimes the most real things in the world, are things we can’t see.” I might push back on stating so firmly that seeing is believing, but I’ll allow it for now.

When it comes to Santa Claus, I try to be honest with my children in an attempt to not traumatize them with the notion of a large man entering the house in the middle of the night after spying on children all year, rating them on their behaviors and rewarding or punishing them accordingly. At the minimum, our cultural view of Santa is a little creepy, and to the extreme, it can teach moralism based on the appearance of our actions to others and a commercialized view of Christmas where it is all about the gifts we get.

My family tries to get around this by celebrating St. Nicholas Day on December 6th, where we talk about how Santa Claus was a real person and all the wonderful things he did. We use this time to give a couple of presents and fill their shoes with chocolate gold coins. This way, we can reserve Christmastide for Christ’s birth. And, yes, they still receive gifts on Christmas day from family and a book each day of the 12 days of Christmas. At least, this is what Kelsey and I do. The kids, especially Dietrich will not believe us when we say that Santa Claus is not still alive and flying around delivering presents to children on Christmas morning. He will reluctantly go along with what we say but at the first affirmation of Santa Claus by someone else, it is immediately, “See, I told you, Dad, Santa is real.”... Well, you know, “the best-laid plans of mice and men” and all that.

There is one man, however, who makes me rethink my approach and causes me a mental wrestling match each year over this topic. His name is G.K. Chesterton—if you don’t know Chesterton, after reading this, go and look him up and familiarize yourself with him, you will be rewarded for it. Chesterton, even at the end of his life, "believed in Santa Claus." In an article he wrote in 1935, titled “Santa Claus and Science,” he says, “[T]hough I am (unfortunately) no longer a child, I do most definitely believe in Santa Claus; though I prefer to talk about him in my own language. I believe that Saint Nicholas is in heaven, accessible to our prayers for anybody; if he was supposed to be specially accessible to prayers of children, as being their patron, I see no reason why he should not be concerned with human gifts to children. I do not suppose that he comes down the chimney; but I suppose he could if he liked. The point is that, for me, there is not that complete chasm or cutting off of all relations with the religion of childhood, which is now common in those who began by starting a new religion and have ended by having no religion.”

 In his article, Chesterton looks at the link between the loss of myth and mystery in the world and the increase in the belief that the only things worth believing are those things that can be scientifically verified. In today’s world, there is a gap between imagination and reason, as though they oppose each other. Elsewhere, Chesterton writes against this modern notion saying, “Imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.” For me, this is the rub, what we believe and imagine forms and shapes our understanding of truth. In one way, Santa Claus can teach us a life of giving and serving others. He can remind us of the saints and that there is more to this world than what meets the eye. But our modern view of Santa could also teach us that God is a moralistic genie waiting to receive our lists of wants that we deserve based on our actions. The question remains, how might we secure the teaching of the former while protecting against the latter?

 At the end of the article, Chesterton poses his final question, “Is the child to live in a world that is entirely fanciful and then find suddenly that it is entirely false? Or is the child to be forbidden all forms or fancy; or in other words, forbidden to be a child? Or is he, as we say, to have some harmless borderland of fancy in childhood, which is still part of the land in which he will live: in terra viventium, in the land of living men? Cannot the child pass from a child’s natural fancy to a man’s normal faith in Holy Nicholas of the Children without enduring that bitter break and abrupt disappointment which now marks the passage of the child from a land of make-believe to a world of no belief?”

 I wish Chesterton would have provided exactly how you are to find this “borderland of fancy” and how to kindle it in your children since we have often forgotten the way from “natural fancy” to “normal faith.” His point is well noted though, perhaps, we all have spent too much time in a world of no belief. And the way forward, as one commentator on Chesterton’s article wrote, is that “what as a child we saw dimly, in natural fantasies, we should see as an adult. We must not go blind by giving it up, as atheists do, but grow up by seeing it clearly. To put [it] in biblical terms: we must become as little children as part of growing into the full stature of Christ.”

I can’t say that my way of approaching Santa Claus with my children is the only right way, I am still trying to figure out how to do that well. But it appears to me, that we all—you and me—could use a little dose of Santa Claus this coming Christmas. We shouldn't write him off as someone who died 1700 years ago, nor place him in the world of fiction, but see him as alive in Christ. I pray, that this Advent season we prepare our hearts and minds for the coming Christmas season. That we should all become like children, that we might believe that "St Nicholas of the Children" (as Chesterton calls him) is real and, in Christ, present to us; that we might hear the heavenly company of angels, saints, and martyrs singing; and in doing so, that we might see Christ this Christmas.

St Nicholas of the Children, ora pro nobis. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Aaron