Cancelling Christmas

Gary Clayton shares the importance of Christians sharing the truth about Christmas to their children to dispel the myths that surround this important season

“So,” I asked my wife, “what on earth do we tell Christopher?”

It wasn’t quite the night before Christmas, but it was getting nearer, and we had to decide what to say about Santa.

In the end, we decided that honesty was the best policy. “Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’, No’” (Matthew 5:37) and all that!

We didn’t want him growing up believing in anything that wasn’t true, though we knew that not every parent felt the same.

It also saved us having to decide how long to wait before finally coming clean about Father Christmas not being real. In the event, our two-year-old son took the news really well and promised to keep it to himself.

Later, we wondered if we’d done the right thing, but God graciously vindicated our decision when, a few weeks later, I was asked to dress up as Santa for the school grotto, and our extremely perceptive son stumbled across a large plastic bag containing my costume, beard and wig!

If we hadn’t told him the truth, it would’ve been like the scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming, when Ned stumbles across Peter Parker’s Spider-Man costume!

Heaven knows how Chris would have reacted if he’d come to the disturbing conclusion that Father Christmas was not only real but alive and well and living in a semi-detached house in Kent!

“Why,” he would have asked, “is Dad still home on Christmas Eve, and why isn’t there a sleigh and eight reindeers parked outside?”

As a child, I often wondered how Father Christmas could appear in so many different stores at once. Perhaps, I reasoned, he had a secret trap door so that as soon as I exited one department store, he’d shoot down the hatch only to appear in another, further down the road!

Actually, I find the whole Father Christmas concept grimly fascinating. While Jesus offers unsaved sinners unmerited grace, our capitalistic Mr Claus majors on materialism and good works, asking recalcitrant children if they’ve been good. 

But, although Mark 10:8 tells us that no one is good except God, through a kind of behavioural blackmail, children are led to believe that, as long as their good deeds outweigh the bad – that they’ve been more ‘nice’than ‘naughty’ – then they’ll definitely get a gift at Christmas. 

The gift doesn’t of course reflect the extent of the child’s apparent goodness. Instead, its size, usefulness or magnificence says more about the parents’ generosity, extravagance or wealth than the child’s supposedly year-long good behaviour.

It’s as potentially manipulative as the bit in ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ where, referencing Jesus, we’re told: ‘Christian children all should be, mild, obedient, good as He’ – a verse choirs, carollers and congregants either sing as a forlorn hope, an earnest desire, or a self-satisfied sense of parental pride!

It’s another reason why we decided not to spend the long nights of the holiday period telling tall tales around a log fire, as it were, or enabling shop tills to keep ringing at our expense.

In England, during the Civil War, Christmas was banned by a Puritan parliament that viewed it as a time of drunkenness, indulgence and impiety. This ban remained until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

But the God-fearing Puritans weren’t the only ones seeking to ban Christmas. Someone else who sought to do so didn’t, not because of his strong Christian convictions, but because he was an atheist!

That’s why, from 1929-1935, Communist dictator Joseph Stalin banned Christmas. The sale of Christmas trees became a criminal offence, with Grandfather Frost – Santa Claus’ Russian counterpart – being temporarily banished as a bourgeois ally of capitalists, priests and kulaks (wealthy peasants).

In a sense, Stalin was right. Although it’s quite possible to see the whole ‘fat man in a red suit’ as a harmless story for small children, it increasingly revolves around rampant consumerism and conspicuous consumption, with Santa sometimes referred to as ‘the patron saint of capitalism’.

I remember the time a smartly dressed shop assistant realised our youngsters knew that Santa wasn’t going to squeeze his way down our non-existent chimney to deliver whatever inappropriately expensive gifts they temporarily craved. She looked at us as if we’d done something terrible.

But we hadn’t – all we’d done was tell our youngsters the truth!

So, although Christmas is a great opportunity to celebrate Jesus’ birth, share the Gospel, and spend time with family and friends, it also comes with a unique set of challenges – Father Christmas being but one of them…

Gary Clayton is married to Julie, father of two teenagers, and works for Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF). www.maf-uk.org