SANTA CLAUSE: FACT OR FICTION?

 

Why should we not allow our children to let Santa Claus be such a part of Christmas?  Well, what I am about to say may not make you feel good or make your ears tingle, but it will shed some light on this fact that has sat dormant for way too long.  In this edition of “SoulWinning”, I will address five reasons to not let Santa Claus be an active partaker of your yearly Christmas traditions. 

I’m not a glass half empty person, I say the glass is half full.  Now, not to take half of your glass…I like Santa Claus movies, like “The Santa Claus” with Tim Allen.  The songs also have great tunes, but I only like them because Santa Claus is fictional.  Quite like half of the stuff we read or listen to now-a-days.  While Santa Claus and its modern portrayal is not a real entity in our home, we do know of and respect the real history behind it.  We will be looking at that later. 

1.       You know the song “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”?  The fact that people believe he knows when we are sleeping, knows when we are awake, and has all the power to give us (and every other person on the planet earth) to give us a plethora of gifts every Christmas, is a direct opposition of the first commandment: “You will have no other God before me” (1).  Giving Santa the position of omnipresence, omniscient, and also omnipotence, puts him at or above the level of God. 

2.       People put Santa and his gifts first rather than the ultimate reason we celebrate Christmas, which is for the birth of Christ that eventually led up to his ultimate sacrifice.  “God sent His only Son, that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life” (2).  We are willing to trade that all and believe in a fictitious man that is obese? 

3.       We do not need to be raising our children into having such a strong belief in Santa rather than God.  Because, later in their life when we tell them the truth and that Santa was not real, they will not believe due to the fact that they have been lied to.  Also, they will lose faith and trust in their parents who have been lying to them their entire life, and finally find out a lot of the other stuff they believe in is also a lie (such as the tooth fairy).

4.       By observing normal life (especially around Christmas), I have noticed that people will often tell their kids that if they aren’t good, Santa won’t bring them any gifts.  The problem with saying this is that this gives parents the ultimatum to not punish their kids.  Even “Christian” parents will say this stuff and the Bible says, “Spare not the rod” (3).  Because parents aren’t strong enough to punish their kids when they do something wrong, they blame everything on a person that isn’t real.  So, any repercussions get blamed on someone the parents know isn’t even real.

5.       Modern day Santa also conflicts with the second commandment “Do not make any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (4).  I have witnessed firsthand that parents are so adamant that their kids do not learn the truth about Santa, that they will silence the people who are talking about how Santa is not real.  They will literally interrupt you when you are saying something about the fakeness of it, just so the kids who are in hearing range won’t hear the truth. 

 

 

 

Here is some brief history into the REAL St. Nicholas and some of the progression of its popularity.

“St. Nicholas of Myra (March 15, 270 A.D.-December 6, 343 A.D.) also known as Nicholas of Bari, was an early Christian bishop of Greek descent from the maritime city of Myra in Asia Minor (Modern day Demre, Turkey) during the time of the Roman Empire.  Because of the many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker.  St. Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, unmarried people, and student in various cities and countries around Europe.  His reputation evolved among the pious, as was common for early Christian saints, and his legendary habit of secret gift-giving gave rise to the traditional model of Santa Claus through Sinterklaas.” (5)

“Over the course of many years, Nicholas’ popularity spread, and he became known as the protector of children and sailors.  His feast day is celebrated on the anniversary of his death, December 6.  This was traditionally considered a lucky day to make large purchases or to get married.  By the Renaissance, St. Nicholas was the most popular saint in Europe.   Even after the Protestant Reformation, when the veneration of saints began to be discouraged, St. Nicholas maintained a positive reputation, especially in Holland.  St. Nicholas made his first inroads into American pop culture towards the end of the 18 century.  In December 1773, and again in 1774, a New York newspaper reported that groups od Dutch families had gathered to honor the anniversary of his death.  The name Santa Claus evolved from St. Nicholas’ Dutch nickname, Sinter Klaas, a shortened form of Sin Nikolaas (Dutch).  In 1804, John Pintard, a member of the New York Historical Society, distributed woodcuts of St. Nicholas at the society’s annual meeting.  The background of the engraving contains now-familiar Satna images including stocking gilled with toys and fruit hung over a fireplace.  In 1809, Washington Irving helped to popularize the Sinter Klaas stories when he referred to St. Nicholas as the patron saint of New York in his book, The History of New York.  As his prominence grew, Sinter Klaas was described as everything from a “rascal” with a blue three-cornered hat, red waistcoat, and yellow stockings to a man wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a “huge pair of Flemish trunk hose.” (6)

Overtime, St. Nicholas has progressed, but now in our modern age, it has gotten to the point where we are willing to break explicit commands from the Bible (that people used to get stoned over if broken), to celebrate this man.  I hope this article has helped you to see the dangers of Santa Claus as he is modernly portrayed and why you should avoid it.  Do not just take my word for it.  Study scripture and compare it to the way we see Santa portrayed.  Is this not a direct opposition to Christianity?

 

Thank you for reading, Elijah-Founder of Mustard Ministries