December 21, 2007
Friday

It is the beautiful task of Advent to awaken in all of us memories of goodness and thus to open doors of hope.
                — Joseph Alois Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), b. 1927
                    German theologian and leader of the Roman Catholic Church

The piece I wrote yesterday explaining my decision to present Santa Claus to my daughter (now twenty-two) as a fantasy figure and not as a reality drew more comment, both public and private, than any other piece I’ve ever written. One reader who used the same method I did said a colleague berated her annually because she “robbed [her] children of the experience of Santa Claus.”

Let’s be clear about this. Neither Lynn nor my reader’s children were deprived of anything. They had Santa Claus, as they had the Little Drummer Boy, the shepherd boy Amahl from Gian-Carlo Menotti’s Christmas opera, and La Befana, a figure in Italian folklore who brings gifts to children. (The latter three figures are at least woven into the nativity story. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, the prototype for Santa Claus, did not even live until the fourth century after the birth of Christ.) They had these familiar personages as they had all the other fantasy figures in their lives.

It should also be noted that I never encouraged or instructed Lynn to give some smart-aleck answer when a well-meaning adult would ask her what Santa Claus was going to bring her. We’re not hyper-evangelistic fundamentalists who go around pointing out to everyone that Christmas trees are not in the bible and that a crèche should not display both shepherds and wise men because they weren’t there at the same time. In fact (and this might surprise, disturb, or outrage some people), although we display a crèche and other symbols of the nativity, our belief and our practice during the season is not crafted as a birthday celebration for the baby Jesus. Why? For one thing, those symbolic stories about shepherds and grumpy innkeepers and a birth in a stable “at midnight in Bethlehem in piercing cold” (the words of a prayer my grandmother was fond of — it’s 50º in Bethlehem right now) spring every bit as much from myth and legend as do the stories about Santa Claus. To reduce everything to a simple birth narrative seems to me to trivialize the True Meaning of Christmas.

And what is that True Meaning? The True Meaning has to do with hope, with change, with having one more chance to get it right for ourselves and to do right by others. Back on December 2 I wrote about what the Lutheran pastor whose congregation I worshipped with that day said about such matters:

In his sermon, Pastor Phil addressed the “true meaning of Christmas.” Is it spending time with family and friends? Appreciating the beauty of nature? Being especially generous?  All those things are important, he said. But the true spirit is really about the profound change that can happen in your own soul, the decision once more to move into whatever a new year might bring with courage and resolve.

A few weeks ago in Buffalo, Wyoming, I visited an art gallery that features work by local artists and potters and glass blowers and by others as well. I bought some items by Brian Andreas, an artist whose work I’ve known for a long time. He’s a storyteller renowned for his exuberance and his life-affirming statements. One large drawing will go in my kitchen along with the one I bought for Ron’s birthday in Boston in 2003. I think the thought sums up for me what the True Meaning is:

There are things you do because they feel right and they may make no sense and they may make no money and it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other and to eat each other’s cooking and say it was good.

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