A little preschool girl was in the bank as her mother waited in line for a teller. It wouldn’t be correct to say the child was in the line with her mother. Rather, she roamed among the bank staff desks arranged around the lobby.
In an effort to keep her daughter in line, the mother said, “Why don’t you go over there and get a sucker from the nice lady and then come back to me?” The little girl got her sucker, but she continued walking around the room.
“You need to be a good girl and get back on line,” the mother urged. “If you’re not a good girl, the bank will take your sucker away from you.”
Suckers or other sweets are available in banks as a little something extra to please the customers, not to bribe children into submission. Have you ever seen a bank employee take a sucker away from a naughty child?
It didn’t work. The girl continued her expeditions as the mother remained in line.
This empty threat of the child losing her sucker calls to mind the song: “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town.” The song endows the Great Gift Giver with omniscience. Children are warned to “watch out” and not to pout or cry because Santa is “comin’.” Then the kiddies are given details of Santa’s great knowledge: He knows whether they are asleep or awake and whether they’ve been bad or good. He keeps a list and double-checks to see who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.
Eddie Cantor was an entertainer from the old Vaudeville stage shows as well as in early movies and the golden age of radio. Cantor premiered “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town on his network radio show. J. Fred Coots, a co-author of the song, was a writer for Cantor’s show. 1
That song, which has been around since the 1930s, was followed a decade or so later by “Here Comes Santa Claus,” published and promoted in 1947 by another celebrity: Gene Autry, who starred in Western movies and had a radio show. 2 This song also confers virtual omniscience: Santa loves all the little ones the same, whether they are rich or poor. Furthermore, Santa knows they're all God’s children, which makes everything OK.
“Here Comes Santa Claus” goes an extra step, offering an outright sermonette regarding the Jolly Old Elf: The tykes are encouraged to jump into their beds and cover their heads, after they hang their stockings and say their prayers, in anticipation of Santa Claus’s imminent arrival. They’re also admonished to give thanks to the Lord above and are assured that peace on earth will come to all who follow the light.
Both these songs have an element in common with the mother in the bank: They all attempt to manipulate children into obedience with deliberate misinformation. The mother’s tactics are a poor approach to discipline for a young child. The songs ascribing divine omniscience to Santa Claus contain faulty theology.
Neither song purports to be religious as such. Both were written for popular commercial appeal rather than Sunday school instruction. Still, they convey wrong impressions as they impute godlike knowledge to this mythical Bringer of Gifts.
No doubt, many parents use Santa Claus as an innocent game during their children’s formative years. But if there is more than one child, parents often try to preserve and protect the innocence of young children when the firstborn connects the dots after discovering brightly wrapped presents in a closet.
Other parents consider Santa Claus almost as indispensable to proper observance of Christmas as Jesus. They see belief in Santa a veritable theological issue. They hold on to the description an editor wrote in 1897. It has been reprinted by hundreds of papers every Christmas since that date. 3
Virginia O’Hanlon, an eight-year-old girl in New York City, had been told by school friends that Santa Claus was not real. So she wrote to the editor of the old New York Sun, asking, “Is there a Santa Claus?” Newsman Francis Pharcellus Church responded with an open letter to little Virginia:
“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. . . .
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist . . . Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! . . .
“ The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. . . .
“Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
“No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”
This editorial is a beautiful poem, written to preserve that childhood innocence we noted earlier. But if you remove the reference to fairies dancing on the lawn, the entire essay could be used as defense for belief in God.
Sad to say, some Christ-loving, church-going parents put more effort into protecting the Santa Claus fantasy than they put into helping their children understand the love God showed in sending His Only Begotten Son into the world at Christmas.
It’s easier to do Santa Claus for several reasons:
*He’s everywhere -- on television, on the Internet, in newspapers, on billboards, and in stores, starting practically right after Labor Day, and on through the after-Christmas clearance at the mall.
*He’s also with our children in day care and kindergarten, at church, and in the neighborhood. We didn’t do much Santa Claus with our boys. But our younger son, Jonathan, brought Old St. Nick home with him when he saw and heard about him in all those places.
*Because Santa Claus is visible everywhere we look, it’s much easier for our kids to visualize and relate to him than to Jesus. After all, Jesus shows up mostly through pictures in their Sunday school rooms and in lesson leaflets they bring home.
*For us as adults, it’s also more difficult to deal with the intangible, despite our deep desire to help our children in the formation of their faith.
*Even in this country, which many like to think of as a Christian nation, the effort to focus on the birth of Jesus is like a minority report. And, in most cases, minority reports get laid on a shelf and forgotten.
But, with the awareness of visual impact in current technology, we as parents and grandparents can provide visuals in the home to supplement our effort to help our little loves understand a bit more about Jesus as the real center of Christmas:
• An Advent wreath with candles along with a brief verse or thought at mealtime
• A creché with the biblical figures at a conspicuous location
• CDs and DVDs or older technology with age-appropriate focus on the biblical story
• Age-level books which include pictures that help tell the story of the birth of Jesus, along with the shepherds and angels from Luke 2, the Wise Men from Matthew 2, and Mary and Joseph in chapters 1 and 2 from both Luke and Matthew.
It’s worth the effort to keep oncoming generations informed of the good news, old but ever new.
3 Francis Pharcellus Church, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” www.newseum.org/yesvirginia
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