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A good friend of mine got married, and shortly thereafter, pregnant, earlier this year. As she weathers this winter in Japan, praying for her husband to be safe while he’s out on assignment with the Navy, she’s contemplating what future Christmases will hold for herself and her children. The other day, she asked me about Santa Claus: did my family do the Santa Claus thing? Did we leave out cookies, visit Santa at the mall, and go to bed early on Christmas Eve so Santa would have time to squeeze down the chimney? 

As far as I can remember, we did none of it. I was never taught that Santa existed, and never really felt like I was missing out on much. When I asked my father why my folks had never convinced us that Santa was real, he simply said, “I think if you start lying to your kids, they’re going to start not believing you. Duh.” That’s a great answer, but it’s completely unrelated to why I’m glad we never did the Santa thing.

In the modern interpretation, Santa Claus gives gifts only to good children, and these are given as prizes for being good all year. He sneaks into your home while you are asleep, but you never see him. You can send him letters, but he won’t write back. This is because he doesn’t know you. But my family, with whom I’ve exchanged presents every year, does know me. And it seems to me that gifts given out of love are better than prizes won by the deserving. After all, we won’t always be deserving, but we can (and will, whether we know it or not) always be loved. And gifts given to you by people that you know love you and have put thought, effort, time, and sacrifice into getting you exactly what you want? That’s the best. And I think it’s the same as the difference between mercy and justice: mercy is given because it is required by love, and as an act of grace; justice is given because it is deserved. When praying to God, we rarely say, “Please, Lord, when I come before you, be just!” We should know better than to wish for that.

So I’m not sure that Santa is in the spirit of Christmas, mostly because I’m not sure he’s in the spirit of Christian living. These days, I tend to think of Christianity more and more in humanist terms. I don’t mean that we should reject the divine nature of Jesus, or that the theology of the religion is useless; I simply mean that the part of Christ’s story which holds a personal message for me is not the miracles — which were proof of his Godhood, and the effects of his compassion — but the relationships he built, and the way that he taught and treated the people around him.

As an Episcopalian, I’ve grown up with a distinct fondness for liturgy, for church tradition and history, art and architecture, and for our works of theology. These things are important to my personal practice, but I think that they’re also the accoutrement of the faith. Although they can be useful to refine one’s understanding of how to live a Christly life, they can also cause a drift of mental clutter that gets causes me to be distracted from the idea that Christ, far from being a distant Man in the Sky, was a personal God.

In his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” (contained in some editions of “The Weight of Glory”), C. S. Lewis writes:

It is not an accidental resemblance that what, from the point of view of being, is stated in the form “God became Man,” should involve, from the point of view of human knowledge, the statement “Myth became Fact.” The essential meaning of all things came down from the “heaven” of myth to the “earth” of history. In so doing, it partly emptied itself of its glory, as Christ emptied Himself of His glory to be Man. That is the real explanation of the fact that Theology, far from defeating its rivals by a superior poetry, is, in a superficial but quite real sense, less poetical than they.

Lewis is using the idea of the poetry in story to state an idea that diverges pretty drastically from many other religions. Christ’s incarnation is the descent of the divine, rather than a man who ascended to Godhood. The earlier gods of Greek and Roman pantheism were super-human, and this was a reason to praise them — for their glory, and their divinity. Praise was given out of hope and fear. But in Christ, we find a God descended, and one who deserves praise given in the form of love, because of his love. Christ’s death and resurrection are important, and the ascension is vital to the Christian faith — but I think it is the incarnation of God as man that is at the center of Christian living, and it is this aspect of Christ’s story that comes to fore during the seasons of Advent and Christmas. There’s an implied idea that if he can do it, we can do it too: we can be Godly men and women, and we have a clear example — as Jesus tells his disciples, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

Blame “Art and Fear” for putting the thought into my head.