*- By Christmas, for this discussion, I mean the secular Santa & Reindeer show the majority of America celebrates.
I’m a firm Dawkins-esque Atheist and my two young children believe in Santa Claus. Childhood wonder and fantasy are good things and one day they will suspect, and adults will confirm, that he is not real. But the parallels between the celebration of modern Santa Claus and Christianity are way too powerful to ignore for those adults who still believe in Jesus.
I think the whole thing is funny. If I was one of the 83% of Americans who identify as Christian it would bother me to generate a child’s belief in false profits. To tell them to behave so they get rewarded or avoid punishment by a magic being who lives in an impossible to reach place, where he is aided by other magic beings. Telling them about unicorns, fairies or goblins is not the same thing.
Sure, ‘Remember Christ, he is the reason for the season’ refrains abound and mangers are everywhere, but that is not what children celebrate, manger-Jesus school plays notwithstanding. And sure, the inevitable wails decrying the commercialization of the celebration ring out, but Jesus’ followers sit outside stores on Black Friday in substantial numbers too.
I can understand an immigrant from another faith coming to the United States and celebrating this holiday. It’s more American than Christian at this point. What I don’t understand is why is this holly jolly fat man not a walking insult to a professed Christian’s core belief structure?
Do you mean like “rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”?
I see no paradox in the fat jolly old man and the core Christian principle of “loving your brother as you love yourself” … No Christian would condone beating somebody up for the last Lumberjack Jill doll on the shelf.
We actually exchanged presents on Martin Luther King Jr. Day … I felt that was a more “here-and-now” spiritual understanding than some brat born in a horse’s stall … not to mention the cash savings buying after Christmas … and that left Christmas morning open for reading from the Bible … except Grandma Moneybags always interfered [grin] …
No I think he is saying that celebrating Christmas should short circuit a Christian’s brain when they realize that telling kids to be good or they suffer on Christmas is a lot like telling Christians to be good or they will suffer on judgment day.
Shouldn’t that get you to thinking that perhaps Christianity is a method of ensuring good behavior?
But for the same reason why good behavior is good for kids it is good for Christians.
And the NUMBER ONE reason Christians celebrate Christmas is because they don’t want to feel left out. Its why my Jewish friends always celebrated Christmas.
All my Jewish friends share their candle thingy … it’s always okay to not participate … it’s just wrong being a jerk about it … which my Jewish friends aren’t …
Tradition. Sure, Santa (at least the way Americans have come to celebrate him) almost certainly qualifies as a false god for children, but come on, he’s fun and jolly and it’s all in good fun! If you’re looking for a theological justification for convincing children that a non-Jesus, gift-giving, all-seeing, sin-judging, time-and-space-warping supernatural entity exists you aren’t going to find it.
The façade of Americanized Christianity is visible through many facets of American life; I need not name examples here, but the election speaks volumes re: the mainstream, received interpretations* of Christian practice vs the 21st century American interpretation of Christian practice. Christmas is just another example.
*I attended Protestant churches for 30 years and I’d say a solid 80% of the people there, regardless of how long they’d been in church, had only a tenuous understanding of what Christianity looked like in light of the words of Jesus, Paul, et al. I doubt many of the 60 year olds faithful congregants could have provided an acceptable 30 second elevator speech about core tenets of their version of Christianity. They’d never thought about it.
We did get Chinese food, and go to the movies. For three years in a row my Jewish friends and I went to Chinatown in Boston and then saw the Lord of the Rings movies. So I guess you could say we had Christmas-time traditions, just not Christmas traditions.
I celebrate Santa-Christmas because I, like many others, am capable of simultaneously having fun and being Christian.
The only place that Santa and Jesus are both the centerpieces of mystic systems to ensure obedience based on false premises is in the minds of buzzkills, this particular subset of which is comprised mainly, but not exclusively, of atheists.
My religion isn’t based on obedience due to fear of punishment/deprivation; thus, those cartoonish “better not pout” elements of Santa-Christmas don’t offend my religious sensibilities at all.
Maybe, instead of teaching your kids about Santa’s conditional affections, you should’ve taught them about Jesus’s unconditional sacrifice.
People have been celebrating the winter solstice in one form or another since time immemorial. Christmas is just the latest incarnation. Indeed, until very recently, Easter - aka the Spring equinox - used to be the major Christian celebration.
My parents were converted to Catholicism and never taught us to believe in Santa Claus. We celebrated Christmas to commemorate the gift Christ gave us in Himself. That said, we had a tree and gifts and other trappings. I don’t see a conflict between that and celebrating the religious feast day.
We also didn’t get taught about an Easter bunny, but they did participate in the Tooth Fairy ruse. That must have been because it was unrelated to religion and just harmless fun.
I suspect that a thorough answer to the question would involve a long history lesson, covering the history of Christmas, the history of Santa Claus, and maybe the history of Christianity.
I think you’re overestimating the similarity between Christianity and the Santa myth. For instance, the “professed Christian’s core belief structure” is not centered around “Good children get rewarded.”
The question reminded me of the following quote by C.S. Lewis (who, FWIW, saw fit to include Father Christmas in a story about Aslan):
I find Lewis’s use of the term “sacramental” here intriguing. A sacrament is “a visible symbol of the reality of God, as well as a means by which God enacts his grace. … Sacraments signify God’s grace in a way that is outwardly observable to the participant.” And I think a case could be made that there can be a sacramental quality to some of the holiday trappings that are not specifically religious, such as Santa Claus as he is sometimes portrayed.
I’m a Christian and I don’t celebrate Christmas in any way. I also don’t celebrate Easter, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July or any Holiday except for my wedding anniversary and my wife’s birthday because I kind of have to. Stopped celebrating a few years ago and it has been so freeing. No present buying, saving money, no stupid dinners with people who don’t really care if I come and I don’t care if I see them. I wish them well but don’t need the bother.
Put simply, because Jesus isn’t my parents or grandparents. There’s nothing that Jesus does that is really someone else doing it. There’s no reason to make the leap from “Santa isn’t real” to “Jesus isn’t real”
But OP’s question seems more involved than that. That only covers the third paragraph.
Christian celebrate Christmas because it is their holiday. Sure, it started non-Christian, but they fully adopted it. Santa is St. Nicholas. He’s not secular. We Christians added all that stuff to the mythos. Sure, it’s now watered down enough that non-Christians can easily celebrate it (even if some choose not to due to its Christian roots).
And Christianity is not remotely that simple. It’s not “be good and get stuff.” That’s prosperity gospel, and is decried by most Christians as a false gospel. There is the idea of heaven, but that’s still not “be good and get to heaven.” That’s about believing in Jesus and finding a hope after death.
Yeah, maybe you can say that it’s a “little kids version of Christianity.” But then that would just be practice for believing the big stuff. Heck, I know some atheists who oppose the Santa myth on those grounds.
Wait, what? When did Christianity stop being “be good in this life so you can be rewarded in the next life”? Maybe I’m underthinking this, but that sounds a whole lot like “be good today and you’ll get a present tomorrow”. How can you not see the parallels between religion and santa?
Most Christmas pageants feature the Magi visiting Baby Jesus in the manger, which conflates two completely different stories. The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke contradict known history, science, common sense, and each other, and have little in common other than Joseph being cuckolded by the Holy Spirit.
That Christians didn’t seem to notice this puzzled me for many years, until I read the Pew survey that found that most Christians know next to nothing about the Bible, e.g. only a third of American Catholics can even name the four gospels, so it’s a safe bet that most of their knowledge of the contents comes precisely from those inaccurate pageants.
So I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if most Christians thought that Santa, and even Rudolph, were in the Bible.
So tell me how important is Hanukkah to Jews if Christmas is actually observed as a religious holiday by the rest of the world and not a smorgasborg of children’s toys?
