St Margaret's Church Prestwich

Rev Sue preached this sermon on Wednesday 6 December 2023. Here it si for you again:

Today is the feast day of St Nicholas. Like St Cecilia, who I mentioned a fortnight ago, we don’t know much about his actual life. We do know that he was Bishop of Myra, in what is now Turkey. One of the early legends about him is that he gave three girls a dowry to prevent them having to enter prostitution when their family fell on hard times. He delivered the gifts at night so that he could remain anonymous. So, he became identified with the giving of gifts to children, firstly by the Dutch, and then by Dutch settlers in North America who merged the legend with a Nordic folklore story about a magician who punished naughty children and rewarded good ones. And so, Santa Claus, to use his Dutch name, was born. There were different customs surrounding the giving of gifts until in 1823 the poem “A visit from St Nicholas” (better known today as The Night Before Christmas) was published. The poem captured the imagination throughout the USA, the UK and beyond, giving us the Santa we know today. The cartoonist Thomas Nash illustrated the poem to give us a rotund Santa with a white beard and sack of toys and added red suit trimmed with white fur, North Pole workshop, elves and his wife, Mrs. Claus. The story was complete.

Meanwhile in the UK Father Christmas presided over merry making and feasts at Christmas. In Victorian times the emphasis at Christmas shifted to families and children and Father Christmas became merged with Santa Claus.

That’s how we got from a fourth century bishop to the modern Santa. He poses a dilemma. Should we tell little children to believe in Father Christmas? What if when they stop believing in Santa, they throw out God as well?

We need to reclaim the idea of myth. These days it’s used to mean something that a lot of people believe that isn’t true such as “goldfish have a 3 second memory”. But the original meaning of myth is a story that is told to explain a deep truth. Like poetry, myths can capture the imagination and explain or illustrate the truth in a way that complements discussion and logic. It is irrelevant whether the events in the story happened – the truth is in the narrative. So Adam and Eve is a myth that speaks to us of our feeling that we are somehow fundamentally flawed. The Greek myth of Pandora’s Box encourages us to believe that although there is much evil in the world, there is always hope, which has the last word.

Santa Claus looked at in this way is an image of a favourite uncle, who can always be relied upon to give us good things. In theory we have to be good to get the presents, but when it comes to it the children are always seem to have been good enough. There is no reciprocity in the relationship – there is no opportunity to give things to Santa. In Christian terms we call this grace – God’s love lavished on the undeserving. Santa represents an aspect of God – his kindness and love to the childlike part of ourselves. Sometimes we need to focus on that simple generosity and put aside the adult understanding of the cross and the obligation we owe to God.

When I was a child, I learnt a good deal about God from the Narnia books which are themselves mythical stories. At the start of “The lion, the witch and the Wardrobe” it is always winter but never Christmas. The first sign that Aslan, the lion who represents Christ, is coming is the ringing of jingling bells.

It was a sledge, and it was reindeer with bells on their harness. But they were far bigger than the Witch’s reindeer, and they were not white but brown. And on the sledge sat a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him. He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as holly-berries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest. Everyone knew him because, though you see people of his sort only in Narnia, you see pictures of them and hear them talked about even in our world—the world on this side of the wardrobe door. But when you really see them in Narnia it is rather different. Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly. But now that the children actually stood looking at him they didn’t find it quite like that. He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still. They felt very glad, but also solemn.

“I’ve come at last,” said he.

In some ways we have come full circle. In the early days of Christianity, as it spread across Europe, the missionaries, instead of forbidding the pagan celebrations Christianised them. After 2000 years of Christendom we are losing ground to the forces of commercialism that dominate our culture. Let’s find what common ground we can, take what is good, and use even the story of Santa Claus to speak of love and grace.