Telling the truth about Santa…

I recently caught the tail end of Radio 4’s Today programme. A presenter was apologising for a remark made earlier in the programme. In a discussion about inventions she’d commented that children would probably vote Father Christmas as one of the best ever inventions. A flood of tweets and texts followed. People were concerned that children able to hear the radio as they journeyed to school by car would discover that Father Christmas is only an invention!

The mock-horror tone of the complaints and the light-hearted “grovelling” apology do not altogether disguise the fact that many people today hold very dear a child’s “right” to believe in the existence of Father Christmas. Undermining that belief in any way before the “appropriate” age is viewed as tantamount to child abuse.

How should Christians respond to these expectations? In our over-commercialised, secular culture, where the true Christmas story is largely buried or avoided, it’s not surprising that non-Christians cling to the modern “myth” of Father Christmas with a religious-like fervency. But what about Christians? Don’t we have compelling reasons to be different?

This tradition of safeguarding the belief of small children in Father Christmas is also alive and well in our churches. It’s not hard to imagine the outrage if someone were to spill the beans about Santa at a Christmas family service. In fact, this is precisely what happened to a preacher that I know in the early days of his ministry. Interestingly, the unhappy complaints came not from visitors, but church members.

So, what should Christian parents be teaching their children about Father Christmas? I and my husband took the approach that there are two Christmas stories—one is magical but fake, whereas the other is thrilling and wonderfully true. And from their earliest days we wanted our children to know the difference.

We didn’t want our children to reach an age where they realised that we hadn’t told them the truth about Father Christmas, and to draw the parallel conclusion that we were not telling them the truth about Jesus Christ.

We didn’t want them to miss out on the fun and enchantment of Christmas. But we wanted them to be enchanted with the true story of Christmas, and the wonder of Jesus Christ’s birth into our dark world—a wonder that needn’t fade as they grew older but could sustain them all through their lives because it is true.

We wanted to have fun with the Christmas traditions too. Precisely because we’ve always told our children that Father Christmas is made-up, we’ve been able to play with all the Santa traditions—stockings mysteriously filled with gifts, half-eaten snacks on Christmas morning, and so on—without any fear of misleading our children.

Of course we need to be sensitive to non-Christian friends and family at this time of year. But in our own homes and families, let’s be unabashed in being different from our culture, honest with our children, and gripped with awe and wonder by the true story and person of Christmas.