The Sacred Santa

"This is a really neat book. It’s a bit different from the other ones I’ve mentioned. The premise of this book is the lament you get every year, that Christmas is becoming less and less about Christ and more and more secular, and more and more removed from its religious roots, particularly in America. It seems like every single Christmas there ends up being some largely manufactured outrage about how some shopkeeper somewhere didn’t say Merry Christmas to somebody or somebody complained about a nativity scene that was in front of somebody’s house or a church. So you get all this anger and frustration that Christmas is somehow being compromised as a religious holiday. What is interesting is that Dell deChant, the author of the book, says that, actually, the modern celebration of Christmas is profoundly religious – it’s just not a religion in the way that most of us are used to looking at one, or conceiving of a religion. It’s got its rituals, it’s got its god, and that god is Santa Claus. One of the most interesting points that the book makes is just how angry and upset people get if anybody is so foolish as to say in public, ‘Well, Santa Claus doesn’t exist!’ There have been stories of teachers who have got into terrible trouble for saying that around children in their classes. Anybody who says that is likely to be labelled as a grinch – even though the fact remains that most of us adults don’t actually believe that Santa Claus exists. We are very comfortable with the idea of this being a mythology that pervades the holiday, and even if there’s not a lot of evidence to believe that somebody like Santa lived up in the North Pole, that this is something to take seriously. Yes, it’s become a religious holiday and it doesn’t really have much to do with the account of Jesus’s birth in the New Testament. But, then again, those accounts have never really been all that central to the way Christmas was actually celebrated. There are some exceptions. “The word it uses to describe the entourage of Magi who travel with the star is a word that usually means a small army.” The wise men, the Magi, bring gifts, and that’s probably something that influences the tradition of gift-giving. But in terms of how Christmas gets celebrated in medieval and Renaissance Europe, it’s basically one big party – it’s an excuse to get drunk and eat lots of food for several days on end. That focus on consumption and on food and drink is still very much with us in the celebration of Christmas. People may say Jesus is the reason for the season, but the accounts of Jesus’s birth haven’t ever been that influential in how people actually celebrate Christmas."