Dear Santa,
First, may I call you St. Nicholas? I’m much more comfortable  with that name.
So St. Nicholas, now that Advent has begun I’m writing to tell you that I’m very concerned. I mean, what happened? For hundreds of years you were this beloved saint, a bishop who loved children and saved three sisters from a life of prostitution. You supposedly punched out a heretic
at the Council of Nicaea and then proclaimed the Truth. You were cool before cool was a word.
But now you’re seen as just being a fat guy in some silly red suit. Sure, people think of you as jolly and an all around guy, but you’ve been stripped of all your coolness and left as little more than a large elf who gives overindulged kids whatever they want for Christmas.
I’ve been thinking about it all and I guess it all began to shift with Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem Twas the Night Before Christmas. It’s a sweet poem; yet it removes all of history and Christianity, pretty much changing the very essence of who you are. Then Coca-Cola got hold of you and there was nothing left of the man you once were.
So I want you to know, St. Nicholas, that things are going to be different in my home. Of course my kids will “believe” in you! Â You’re a real person! A saint in Heaven! But, with all due respect, I don’t want you coming to my house on Christmas Eve. And I don’t want you giving my kids an overabundance of presents. I would quite prefer if you came the night before December 6th and filled their stockings. That way, on your feast day (the 6th) we can talk about you and celebrate your life as a holy man who lived for Christ. Christmas morning my husband and I will give our children a few presents, and we’ll even give them another gift come Epiphany, as we discuss how Christ is the True Gift of Christmas, and how the Wise Men gave what they had to Christ to honor Him.
Some day, if I ever get my act together, maybe you, Bishop of Myra, can come to our house for a St. Nick party. I’ll invite all the kids I know and when you come, dressed with your miter and crosier instead of a hat with a pompom, you can ask the kiddos what they’re doing to prepare for the birth of Christ, instead of asking them what they want for Christmas. My hope is that this will help my family keep Advent as we prepare ourselves for the Incarnation, and also shift the focus of Christmas away from you and back to the Infant Jesus.
I think this is a win-win situation. My kids will (hopefully) learn more about you as a saint, will see Christmas being less about presents and more about Christ, and will grow up rooted in the traditions of their beautiful faith. And they will still get to experience the “magic of Christmas” that comes from your visits.  Plus you will regain some dignity in the way you’re represented and I’m quite confident you’ll rejoice in the way the glorious feast of Christmas is refocused on our Lord and Savior.
Also, please note that I’m not saying this is what I think all Catholic families should do. I think each family should foster the traditions they have or create new ones based on what they believe. My husband and I, though, are pretty certain that this is the best move for our family.
If you have any ideas or suggestions I am definitely open to hearing from you.
I am, most respectfully, yours sincerely.
Bonnie
P.S. Please pray for me and my family and give my boy Peter a big hug.
This letter appeared in a different form on my personal blog Learning to be a Newlywed.
10 thoughts on “Dear Santa,”
For the love of all the saints. Every year, for some reason, I forget that the real purpose of the season of Advent is to provide Catholics a time to engage in iconoclastic hand-wringing about gift-giving conventions.
Let us be very clear about some things.
1. Gift giving on Christmas is not a product of commercialism. Christmas’s status as a festive celebration in the Western Church is of substantial antiquity. The practice of giving gifts on Christmas (as well as on other festive solemnities) has a long provenance. Some Christian nations reserved the larger festival, or the principal time for the exchange of gifts, for some other day: the East tends to emphasize the Epiphany, the low countries (when there were Christians there) St. Nicholas Day.
2. The representation of St. Nicholas (or an alternative, mythical figure) as a bringer of gifts during Christmas is not a product of modern commercialism either. The principal bringer of gifts in Italy is not St. Nicholas, but an old woman named Befana. Other cultures emphasizing Epiphany ascribe these functions to the magi, Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. For better or worse, there exists a distinct culture throughout the northern English-speaking world that includes the ascription of gift-giving functions to St. Nicholas and places his principal gift giving on Christmas. That tradition, by itself, is no less worthwhile nor any less Christian than the organic and authentic traditions regarding fictional or quasi-fictional (i.e. gift givers who are real people, but who do not really bring gifts) in other Christian societies.
3. Some of the modern American accoutrements ascribed to Santa Claus are, of course, somewhat silly. But few of them are so thoroughly vapid* or vile as to warrant the banishment of St. Nicholas from his place as a Christmas gift giver in Anglo-American culture. (Why shouldn’t St. Nicholas wear a warm outfit or travel about in a wintry method of transportation when discharging functions in northern climates: he’s not performing a liturgical function, after all.)
One need not have St. Nicholas bring presents on Christmas eve to be a good Catholic. But it’s silly to regard the convention of a quasi-fictional Christmas-eve gift-giver as an improper one for a Catholic society. And one’s conclusion in that regard is not mitigated by recourse to the relativist’s “different strokes for different folks”: one should have the strength of his convictions.
P.S. – I do not generally regard C.S. Lewis as an authority to be relied upon in discussions about Catholic life, but an interesting thought occurs to me. Banishing St. Nicholas from Christmas, and his other nomes de gift all together, makes The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe make rather less sense: “But the White Witch was right not to let Fr. Christmas come, daddy, as he’s a consumerist construct that interferes with the observation of the Solemnity of the Nativity. And St. Nicholas only comes on December 6.” Our faith is not as sterile as all that.
*I do draw the line absolutely at the Fred Astaire special “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” which in addition to being absolute dreck artistically, presents an entirely fictitious story regarding the proper identity of Santa Claus. Not in my house.
Dear Titus,
I think that you are really wrong here. The tradition of gift giving during Xmas is really a product of commercialism and that is also a real American protestant product that has been exported to other countries especially after WWII. If it were a adaptation of some of the older European traditions it would have kept the original dates. You also must notice that the Befana is only associated with Epiphany and not with Xmas,the reason for that should quite obvious as the gift giving on St. Nikolaos day on Dec 6th.
I really enjoyed reading this post and have pondered the question of to believe or not to believe as we have three young children who are entering into the “Santa” age. I especially like the idea of filling stockings and having that tradition on the feast day of St. Nicholas.
This does not follow at all. In fact, the history of liturgical observances belies the sort of rigidity that you posit as natural and necessary. Various feasts have waxed and waned in importance across time and across regions of Christendom. Christmas itself doesn’t even appear on the universal calendar until several centuries after Epiphany was an important feast. So to claim that a practice is not traditional simply because the time of its observance may have moved is simply absurd: it ignores substantial historical evidence to the contrary and invents evidence that does not exist.
The claim about gift-giving being a product of modern commercialism is equally silly. Certainly the practice of exchanging manufactured items purchased as gifts is a modern innovation, if for no other reason than that consumer goods of this type are essentially unknown prior to the industrial revolution. But acts of generosity associated with festivals are as old as human society. The observances dictated in the Old Testament were to be accompanied by the forgiveness of debts and the distribution of alms. Both pagan and Christian peoples exchanged gifts or provided various gratuities on festive occasions.
Finally, the fact that Befana and the Magi come on the Epiphany, not on Christmas, is not really relevant, unless one happens to be Italian or an Eastern Christian. Different Christian cultures have their own legitimate traditions. Evidence suggests that English Catholics observed customs regarding a Father Christmas figure prior to the Reformation. And even if they did not, the point is not dispositive. American Catholics have always lived in an odd cultural milieu, and the demand that we only observe those customs of a sufficiently ancient provenance is not tradition, or traditionalism, or even Jacobitism, it’s merely archeologism.
To make matters worse, it’s a invariably a cherry-picking archeologism of convenience, resorted to as a flimsy defense for building inorganic constructs in our own image. I have never yet heard someone claim that Father Christmas had to be banished because his observance by Catholics in the Xth century was uncertain or non-existent, and then go on to announce that his family would observe the remainder of the Xth century’s Advent and Christmas practices. When someone says they’re banishing Father Christmas and observing a black fast on Christmas Eve, we’ll talk.
Titus, I’m not quite sure why you’re so upset about this.
The above post was to illustrate how my husband and I remember St. Nicholas in our home and how we use him, as a saint, to enrich our faith, family-life, and our love of Christ. I do NOT think that Santa as a jolly, gift-giving elf is bad, but in many ways he and the gifts he bring have far overshadowed Christ as the reason for Christmas in our culture. I feel pretty confident that those points were clear; I think that you were reading things between the lines when nothing was there.
I do not feel silly that my husband and I made this decision for our home and our family’s traditions. I do not feel silly that my family is doing something slightly counter-cultural and in line with the richness of our faith in order to foster a more meaningful Advent and Christmas. I do not feel silly for sharing our tradition here. But I do feel that you are coming off as a bully about something that was supposed to be light-hearted and non-judgemental.
Every family does and should have its own traditions. In our house we chose to eschew Santa Claus, pretty much for all the reasons you state in your wonderful article! But we celebrate St Nicholas Day in a big way. The night before, the kids write a letter to Jesus, and leave it in their shoes. St Nicholas, because he lives in heaven, can take the letter to Jesus for them. He leaves gold chocolate coins in their shoes. The kids get three presents each. (On Christmas they get stockings, and later on Epiphany another three presents.)
Because St Nicholas is the patron saint of children, the kids pick the dinner menu, and pretty much rule the day as far as our schedule goes. 🙂 We also go around our neighborhood and leave (anonymously) bags of gold chocolate coins for our neighbors.
I think it is possible to have a meaningful Christmas season without having a black fast on Christmas. At the same time we’ve wanted to avoid the big present glut that usually occurs on Christmas. We’ve explained to our kids that Christmas is Jesus’ birthday, not theirs–the stockings are a nod to tradition on my side of the family, and so they have something smallish to look forward to. They still have Epiphany, of course, and the presents are spread around the season rather than piled on during one frenzied day. We wait until Christmas Eve to put up and decorate our tree.
St Nicholas is a wonderful saint, and you do a great job of discussing his heritage and tradition here. I have always been uncomfortable with the whole Santa Claus tradition as it is done in the United States.
Before deciding how to deal with Santa, I think it’s important to step back and look at how our culture celebrates Christian holidays as a whole:
1) Easter is about a bunny who lays eggs with candy.
2) Valentine’s day is about sex and Victoria Secret models.
3) Saint Patrick’s day is about binge drinking.
4) Mardi Gras is about spring break and Girls Gone Wild
4) Halloween is about witches and demons.
5) Christmas is about an overgrown elf with presents.
It’s time we start to rethink how we are celebrating these holidays. Do we even know what we are celebrating any more? I applaud Bonnie and her family for putting both St. Nicks Day and Christmas in their proper context despite the criticism she may receive.
I also like that, despite being counter-cultural, she has retained a tradition of gift giving on Christmas. This demonstrates that she is not some crazy scrooge who hates gift giving, but rather, a thoughtful parent who is teaching her children the true meaning of what we celebrate as Christians.
Mike has brought up some GREAT points! The “christian holidays” all have some other “holiday” around it. The Easter bunny really doesn’t have a lot to do with Jesus rising from the dead. Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras) really is the OPPOSITE of lent.
I think everyone just needs to decide FOR THEMSELVES how they are going to celebrate the holidays they celebrate and not worry about other people! I’m really not looking forward to having kids bc of all the criticism that goes around “having kids” and celebrating xyz traditions. Heck some people throw a FIT if you don’t name your kid after Billy Bob who saved you from the well as a kid. My sister says if she marries her bf and has a boy they have to have a name starting with an R because all the men have R names. Which really isn’t fair because what if she wanted to name the child after our father that passed away when we were young? Ugh I’m going to stop before I get more annoyed at myself and other people lol.
Saint-Nicholas day is a big holiday where I live (Flanders). You can read more about it on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas), though it’s mainly about the Dutch version of the feast, not the Flemish one. Or just google ‘sinterklaas’ and you’ll see thousands of pictures of a bishop waving to children. Santa is not Saint-Nicholas!
As for fat tuesday, it’s supposed to be the opposite of Lent. It comes right before Ash Wednesday, and it’s the day you eat all the food that you can’t eat during Lent, so you don’t have that laying around the house during Lent.
As for the Easter Bunny, it’s a celtic symbol for life. Just like eggs are. I like the tradition of the Easter Bells coming back from Rome and bringing chocolate eggs with them on their way to the church, as it links to the silence of the bells on Holy Saturday (“they’re in Rome”), but I don’t think there’s anything ‘wrong’ with a bunny or rabbit as a sign of life. Just like I don’t mind Easter chicks.
Perhaps I was a bit loud. I certainly was not intending to bully anyone. There are many rooms in Our Father’s house, and they permit of a wide variety of cultural expressions of the faith. Certainly no one will be asked to account on the Last Day for how he distributed gifts at Christmas time to his children. In all fairness, Bonnie did not say that she had discovered the One True Way to Celebrate Christmas. I will grant that Santa Claus can be an ambiguous or undesirable element in the milieu of modern holiday celebrations. I continue to insist, at the same time, that attempts, especially by Americans, to distill a Pure Catholic Traditional Christmas with No Benevolent Creatures are unnecessary and unlikely to be successful—not that Bonnie said that she was making such an attempt—and that Benevolent Gift-Giving Creatures are not inherently tools of commercialism. Really, Bonnie should be commended for making a reasonable attempt at tempering the influence of unwanted cultural influences on her family life, and I should have confined my comments more carefully to a discussion of relevant presented points. My second comment, of course, was directed at the statements and implications contained in Cristiano’s reply, and was not intended as an indictment of the statements in the original post.