It seems like such a simple thought...but is so complicated. We're going to see Santa this Saturday. I'm betting this will be the last time. My younger son is 7. I'll miss these Santa days.
I thought I'd share this article. I found it year's ago...and it kind of sums up why I, as an adult, still love Santa...
"Santa Claus puts us in touch with an unconditionally loving goodness.
Dear Readers: Last Christmas I responded to a Florida reader whose friends did not want their children to "believe in Santa Claus". They intended to tell the children the myth was made up so stores could do more business at Christmastime.
The reaction to that column was remarkable...The reader thought her friends were missing something important but wasn't sure what to tell them. She asked what I thought.
A. I too think her friends are missing something, very big. It's always risky to analyze fantasies, but maybe it's worth trying for a moment.
Fantasies, perhaps especially for children but also for adults, are critical ways of entering a world, a real world, that is closed to us in ordinary human language and happenings. They are doors to wonder and awe, a way of touching something otherwise incomprehensible. Santa Claus, I believe, is like that.
No one has expressed this truth more movingly and accurately, in my opinion, than the great British Catholic author G.K. Chesterton, in an essay years ago in the London Tablet. On Christmas morning, he remembered, his stockings were filled with things he had not worked for, or made, or even been good for.
The only explanation people had was that a being called Santa Claus was somehow kindly disposed toward him. "We believed," he wrote, that a certain benevolent person " did give us those toys for nothing. And I believe it is still. I have merely extended the idea.
"Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.
"Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea. Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous gift of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of particularly fantastic good will."
Are not parents of faith blessed, countless times over, to have for their children (and for themselves!) such a fantastic and playful bridge to infinite, unconditionally loving Goodness, the Goodness which dreamed up the Christmas event in the first place?
Call Santa Claus a myth or what you will, but in his name parents and all of us who give gifts at this special time of the year are putting each other in deeper touch with the "peculiarly fantastic good will" which is the ultimate Source of it all.
Plus, it's fun.
I hope your friends reconsider.
©Fr. John Dietzen 2002 "
I thought I'd share this article. I found it year's ago...and it kind of sums up why I, as an adult, still love Santa...
"Santa Claus puts us in touch with an unconditionally loving goodness.
Dear Readers: Last Christmas I responded to a Florida reader whose friends did not want their children to "believe in Santa Claus". They intended to tell the children the myth was made up so stores could do more business at Christmastime.
The reaction to that column was remarkable...The reader thought her friends were missing something important but wasn't sure what to tell them. She asked what I thought.
A. I too think her friends are missing something, very big. It's always risky to analyze fantasies, but maybe it's worth trying for a moment.
Fantasies, perhaps especially for children but also for adults, are critical ways of entering a world, a real world, that is closed to us in ordinary human language and happenings. They are doors to wonder and awe, a way of touching something otherwise incomprehensible. Santa Claus, I believe, is like that.
No one has expressed this truth more movingly and accurately, in my opinion, than the great British Catholic author G.K. Chesterton, in an essay years ago in the London Tablet. On Christmas morning, he remembered, his stockings were filled with things he had not worked for, or made, or even been good for.
The only explanation people had was that a being called Santa Claus was somehow kindly disposed toward him. "We believed," he wrote, that a certain benevolent person " did give us those toys for nothing. And I believe it is still. I have merely extended the idea.
"Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.
"Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea. Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous gift of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of particularly fantastic good will."
Are not parents of faith blessed, countless times over, to have for their children (and for themselves!) such a fantastic and playful bridge to infinite, unconditionally loving Goodness, the Goodness which dreamed up the Christmas event in the first place?
Call Santa Claus a myth or what you will, but in his name parents and all of us who give gifts at this special time of the year are putting each other in deeper touch with the "peculiarly fantastic good will" which is the ultimate Source of it all.
Plus, it's fun.
I hope your friends reconsider.
©Fr. John Dietzen 2002 "
