Santa Clause, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Christmas

The back porch after the first big snowstorm of the year

It still looks like Christmas here in Minnesota, if by Christmas one means snow, but the New Year is well launched, and we have lives to live and decisions to make.   One of the biggest questions that Christians ask themselves is “How do I know the Will of God and follow the Will of God for my everyday life.  This could be related to any aspect of our Christian walk: career, finances, Christian witness, raising kids.  A large portion of our lives is not specifically dictated by Scripture, and yet we are supposed to live our whole lives to the glory of God.  So how do we do that?  I could go on about this ad nauseum (of the making of books, there is no end), but instead I suggest that we practice, with something relatively inconsequential.  Let’s find God’s will for this year’s Christmas.  And let’s start now, at the end of January, because some of us have shopping to  get to.  

According to the research of Tanya Gulevich, who has compiled the impressive Encyclopedia of Christmas, the first “Feast of the Nativity” was scheduled on December 25 in 336 A.D. (C.E.) to give new Christians something to celebrate in the midst of the raucous Roman holidays to Saturn (Saturnalia, December 23), Sol/Mithros (December 25), and the Roman New Year.   The feasting, the greens, the candles and lights, the upside-down social festivals that were so popular in the Middle Ages, and gift giving and special gifts to the poor were already a big part of the culture of the day.  Similar ideas that we now count as Christmassy were encountered as Christianity moved north: the Yule log, eggnog, and winter fairies who came into one’s house and left blessings behind if there was a plate of food or a pot of ale.  And the church, being ever industrious in finding ways to show Christ to the world, took those things over in a “Let us show you what you should really be celebrating.  Take this instead,” sort of way.  

People got on board with Christmas as they became Christians, and they exercised their natural human tendency to celebrate the Light of the World in the light of their newfound faith. That's a good thing.  However, as countries became dominantly Christian, people simply celebrated their winter holidays under the guise of Christmas whether Christ was important to them or not.  And Jesus became an excuse for some very unchristian behaviors like drunkenness and everything that goes with it.   At its best, Christmas is an invasion of divine joy into party that was only earthly before. At its worst, Christmas is all the human tendencies to gluttony, drunkenness, and superstition white-washed with the name of Jesus and passed off as something religious. 

Christmas as we see it today is the way Christmas has always been: a mishmash of people who have deep religious convictions, people who like to have a good time, people who just want some time off, and people who want to make money off of all of them.  It’s not fundamentally Christian in the sense that it doesn’t come from the church or from the Scriptures, but it is fundamentally human.  Human nature has a tendency to celebrate, and anyone reading into the history of Christmas (as I am at the moment) is going to find a lot of human nature wrapped up in threads of the divine.  

After this past Christmas season, I was thoroughly prepared to go Grinchy on the modern practice of Christmas.  There are so many problems with it.    Christmas is too big, too noisy, too expensive, too wasteful for the common good.  It’s an excuse to spend too much, eat too much, and do too much, and really, it has very little to do with the event that we are supposedly celebrating.  Santa Claus is not really Saint Nicholas, and we don't give presents because Jesus is God's gift to us.  We give them because we love our kids and because it's expected of us.  We all know that really, but we like to pretend that all of the hullabaloo has it's roots in something deeper. And contrary to what the nostalgia hounds out there would have us believe, it doesn't get more profound as we look back in time.   And yet however much I would like to wave my Puritan card and say, “No more.  This is nothing but a distraction from where our hearts should be,” God has insisted that I give Christmas another look.  

When the Apostle Paul was writing to the Ancient church (well before Christmas was a thing), the Roman Christians asked him a question about how they should be celebrating the Sabbath.  Now Sabbath, rest, trusting the work of God instead of your own work to take care of you, is a big deal in the Old Testament, but Paul gives the Romans a very open-ended answer: 

"One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike.  Each of them should be fully convinced in [his] own mind.  Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord.  Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God." ~Romans 14:5

The crucial element is the Lord.  He is the difference between religious and secular.  There rest is all a matter of conscience.  Gratitude to Him is the mark of that new light and life that is supposedly at the heart of Christmas.  So as long as our decisions regarding Christmas are marked by faith and gratitude, we have the freedom to celebrate or not celebrate Christmas however we want.  

There is no "right" way to "do" Christmas, as often there is not a "right" way to do most of the things in our lives.  We are not obligated to celebrate Christmas according to any tradition.  We are not obligated to support Christmas at all if we don't see fit.  And neither are non-believers obligated to celebrate Christmas like us.  The most righteous, recycling, Bible-swinging, Advent fasting, no-Christmas-music-until-December-25th-ing fundamentalist is not more right than the woman who buys $100 worth of wrapping paper every year (He might be more environmentally friendly, but that's a blog for another day.)  This is not a holy day unless it’s holy in the minds and hearts of the people celebrating it.  

God's Christmas gift to me this year was freedom from judgment on the subject of Christmas.  God has no desire to condemn our Christmas.  I think He likes to watch us celebrate.  More than that, He likes to be with us as we celebrate.  Certainly, there are a great many parts of the Christmas season that gladden His heart.  But, like all things in life, God wants to use Christmas to draw us up into His heart.  And that is true for everything we do.  There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ.  As long as God is holy to us, as long as we make our choices in faith and gratitude, we will make holy choices.  Holy choices glorify God.  

Glory to God in the Highest. 
That's what we're going for.