The new war on Christmas

Well, that's actually an OLD war. Back in the early 80s my evangelical neighbors were repeating anti-Santa rhetoric from some of the lesser-known TV evangelists at the time (granted, Baker was riding at the top of his game before his fall, and Roberts was one year away from testifying before a nation that God was a blackmail artist, so these lesser-seen ones had reasons to not be noticed by the general public at the time).

Mind you, that didn't stop them from having a tree and putting presents under it, but they didn't use "Santa" as a reason for it.

But the war against "Santa", which goes with the wholesale replacement of "Christmas Carols" with "Holiday Songs" (see Uncertain Principles from yesterday), is an old war, and oddly enough, self-proclaimed secular humanist, Charles Schultz, actually fired the first salvo on the "Jesus" side in the first Peanuts TV special.

Tom the Dancing Bug has something to say about that:
http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2006/12/09/

Well, it does make liars of parents... and older siblings... and neighbors... and advertisers...

I always thought Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny were things we should stop lying to children about. Maybe it is about time we stopped Christmas altogether, see what it's like without our economy tied to Santa's ass and start being giving all year round.

The York, Pennsylvania papers carried letters to the editors speaking against the pagan rituals of Christmas long before attention got diverted to teaching Creationism in Dover high school.
I've seen bits of Christmas television specials over the past week and noted a common theme: protagonists, commonly starting out as skeptics, wind up affirming that they believe (in Santa Claus), and they are rewarded for their belief. To some extent, it seems like a reasonable analogy to use for teaching religion to children; but considered further (parents, teachers, and other figures of authority that try to reinforce the Santa Claus mythos which they know is not exactly true), it would seem not to be something most folks would want to teach their children--authorities lie to train you to keep in step.

Why do they hate christmas? Its not because of terrorists, its because of the atheist delusion!
http://atheistdelusion.cf.huffingtonpost.com/

Aerik - Santa has reindeer, not asses.

:-)

Bob

Sounds like Christians are fighting to remove all the non-Christian elements from Christmas. I wonder how many of them know that Christmas was invented to cover the pagan holiday on December 25th (which is where the Christmas tree comes from originally). Heck, even the Old Testament preaches against celebrating Christmas the way that we do:

Jeremiah 10, written centuries before Jesus birth:

2 This is what the LORD says: "Do not learn the ways of the nations or be terrified by signs in the sky, though the nations are terrified by them.
3 For the customs of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel.
4 They adorn it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so it will not totter.

"the authorities in Post-Reformation England condemned the celebration of Christmas altogether as being a pagan institution"

In Massachusetts, the following law was passed in 1659 and was enforced on the people for 22 years before it was finally repealed. "Whosoever shall be found observing Christmas, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, every such person shall pay as a fine five shillings to the county."

There's always been an undercurrent of unease (or more) with the pagan trappings of Christmas (and in modern times, with Santa Claus). Heterodox groups like JWs make a point of ignoring the holiday, though more orthodox fundamentalists rarely go that far. Of course, the modern Santa Claus himself is more a consumerist patron of shopping malls merchants than a Christian saint, patron of the poor. So there's ample reason to have mixed feelings about the modern Santa, whether or not one is a Christian.

Neither I nor my wife grew up with the Santa story (our families of origins being respectively agnostic and Jewish). However, my family still had a Christmas tree and presents -- I mean, why do you really need to believe in myths (any of them) to observe a fun tradition? While our kids were raised Christian, we told them that Santa Claus was "just pretend" (partly to disarm the consumerist angle, and thinking it unwise at best to mix obvious fibs in with things we really did believe about Christmas. In the end, all four of us seem to have turned out non-believers in any of it).

But I'm struck by the reactions to the pastor's stand: how dare anyone mess with children's belief in Santa! Some adults react to attacks on the Santa myth as much (or even more) as to attacks on the Jesus myth. It's silly: my childhood memories of Christmas are no less "magical" for lacking a real belief in Santa Claus (or Jesus for that matter).

"It is well documented that kids do much better when they have ritual, tradition and spirituality in their lives.

Ritual and tradition shouldn't need to be propped up by maintaining belief in things that at least half the practitioners know are false. With my kids, we continued to give candy that was in theory from the Easter Bunny, and exchanged body parts for money as the Tooth Fairy, for years, as a kind of family game that everyone knew was pretend. But somehow many people are exceptionally touchy about their cherished Santa myth and get really nasty when someone threatens their children's "faith". (I have heard of numerous cases where children have known the Truth about Santa for years, but still pretended to believe so as not to upset their parents!)

"Were the comments true, we would have generations of children who are just greedy little consumers.

And we don't? I guess Australia is more different than I thought, as compared to North America.

My big problem with the Santa thing is that some parents try to string it along after the kid's figured it out. Everyone has different ideas about "to Santa or not to Santa," but it's important not to insult our kids' intelligence (here or anywhere else).

By the time I was 4, I'd figured out that S.C. wasn't a real person. No one lives at the North Pole (it's too cold); if S.C. tried to go to every house in the world, he'd burn up in the atmosphere; and 3 or 4 other logical reasons. (OK, I was an annoying precocious little brat. So sue me.) I spent the next 4 or 5 years putting up with adults telling me I was wrong.

When my son was little, his dad and I told him right out that Santa was pretend, but it's fun to pretend, and don't tell anyone else, it can be just our secret. And you know what? If you do something nice for someone and they don't know who did it, that's sort of like you're being Santa (which is exactly what the original St. Nicholas is said to have done.)

Santa "versus" Baby Jesus? Bull shirt. Santa showed up at every (Baptist) church Xmas party I ever went to, until my last church brought back the story of the original St. Nicholas about 10 years ago - which I thought was really, really cool.

BTW, one of the church Santas had a daughter who was about 2-1/2 when she first saw her dad put on the Santa suit. Thereafter, whenever someone told her to be good or Santa wouldn't bring her any presents, she'd put her hands on her hips and declare emphatically, "My daddy's Santa Claus!" (Of course, this went over really well at pre-school, as you might imagine.)