Believing in Santa is only Half Wrong!

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Believing in Santa is only Half Wrong!

Monday, December 22, 2014
Jeff Lampl



“the word became flesh and dwelt among us”  John 1:14

Saint Nicholas was a bishop in Asia Minor in the fourth century who had been honored for centuries by Christians in that part of the world.  It was then through the crusades that the tradition was learned by European crusaders who brought the tradition home with them.   It all morphed from there.  Santa Claus is a morphed pronunciation of Saint Nicholas.

Of course presents based on being “naughty or nice” is a total repudiation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.   As we learned in Galatians, that is an anti-gospel.  The Gospel tells us that God gives Grace to the naughty!   And of course making Christmas about Santa is a really big adventure in missing the point.

However, what if we could believe that our childhood love of Santa was fantasy, but not merely fantasy?  As Eric Metaxis points out, what if we could accept that although Santa didn’t really exist, nevertheless our desire for him to exist pointed to something that did exist?   What if those who simply believed in anything were only half wrong, because their desire to believe pointed to something that was true, not just in the world itself but inside them?  And what if those who knew Santa Claus didn’t really exist were themselves only half-wrong, because their rejection of that kind of sloppy, childish belief pointed to a real desire to only believe in what was real, really real, not just a sloppy myth or a childhood story.  What if the half–truth of the desire for something beyond us could meet up with the half-truth of the desire for only what is really real and true, which we can know and see and touch in this world too?  What if those two halves could touch and become the one true truth we were both looking for?   Christmas is about that.

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