St. Nicholas Again? Why Not!

Greetings,

      My interest and appreciation of St. Nicholas goes back to my earliest childhood.  Of course, we believed in Santa Claus and for my early years Santa brought the tree and set up a fairly large “Christmas Garden” of Lionel trains, all after I went to sleep on Christmas Eve.  However, I was fairly quickly transferred into an understanding of St. Nicholas and the Christian principles of giving.  While my fundamentalists cousins denounced Santa Clause as the greatest evil known to mankind, I was secure in the knowledge of the Saint and the need to celebrate Jesus’ birth with genuine giving.

      Now I rejoice in the Christmas celebration, the Christmas Spirit, and the wonderful example of St. Nicholas.  I love to share the good news of the birth and the Saint.  Yesterday I shared information about St. Nicholas and once more I want to share this article which I have enjoyed in the past.  (Perhaps the problem is my deep seated psychological need to bury figuratively as well as literally the just deceased husband of one of my cousins, who lived and died a Santa hater, May God Forgive His Wretched Soul.)

In To Dance with God Gertrud Mueller Nelson presents one of the best commentaries on the “Question of Santa Claus” that I have ever read.  Of course, Francis P. Church’s poignant and insightful editorial remains the definitive answer, at least since 1897, but Nelson’s deserves to stand beside it.  In part Nelson is responding to the Roman Catholic Church’s action to “demote” St. Nicholas, a move which clearly, in the minds of many Roman Catholics I know, represents why the church is in the midst of such turmoil. 

“A desire to be truthful with our children has made many people uncomfortable with one of the few myths retained in our cultic celebrations at Christmastime, the concept of Santa Claus or St. Nicholas.  On the one hand we know in our very bones the power and magic of this figure—or certainly he would not be such a persistent force in this season—but on the other hand we don’t know how long we can or should allow children to believe in him or what it is that they should believe.

“I don’t want to get rid of Santa Clause.  But I think that we need to give our Santa Claus, who has evolved out of a very ancient St. Nicholas, a closer examination.  A myth is an exceptionally difficult thing to kill, for it continues to be devastatingly revealing even when we have tampered with it and changed its form by our rationalizations or our moralistic applications.  A figure who can endure with such tenacity ever since the fourth century, and with a stunning continuity of legends and similarity of iconographic representations in so many countries, has got to be real. He may well be the most popular saint the world has ever known, whether he was ever real in history or not.  His legends cannot be brushed aside as “mere” myths because they live on into the present and refuse to die while stories in history, on the other hand, deal with what is dead and past.  Santa Claus is the father figure we all dream about and share in our collective unconscious.  He is a type of God the Father, primal and powerful and, yes, real.”

I won’t bore you any further with my personal commentary on the reality and necessity of Santa Claus as the true witness of Christmas.  Suffice to say, Thank God there is a Santa Claus.

Yours & His,

DED