Santa Claus….and Jesus

Well Christmas has come and gone again for another year. Somehow we managed to survive the madness. I can’t help feeling a twinge of sadness as I take down the coloured lights from my gutters…did we manage to miss the point once again?
I have two kids aged around ten, and this has been our first Christmas without Santa, or at least without the kids pretending that they believe in Santa. This has been a little sad I must say. The tooth fairy also got turfed this year, which may have something to do with some slack parents who kept forgetting to leave the coins out.
I have mused somewhat on how kids journey into becoming cynical about the whole Santa thing.   It takes a lot of faith to believe in a big guy in a red suit who makes a miraculous journey once a year.   I decided that kids ‘want’ to believe that Santa is real, as he brings nothing but good things.  Who wouldn’t want to believe in someone who brings you presents, just for being good, no matter where he is supposed to live.
My daughter was funny about the whole thing, she was quite pointed about wanting us to know that she didn’t believe in the big red guy anymore.   She asked us to put out milk and biscuits for him, and then give me a sly grin when I said that we must check if he had eaten them the following morning.  My son, on the other hand, didn’t give a rip what we thought; all he wanted was the wrapped up boxes under the tree.  I suspect that he got wise to the whole Santa thing a year or two ago, but didn’t really let on.  Perhaps he needed his little sister to back him up in his brave new belief.
It seems to me that once kids have no real use for Santa anymore, they discard him.  Faith is like that – if you decide you don’t need it anymore, it is all too easy to cast it aside.  In terms of spiritual faith, it strikes me that there needs to be something more going on than just enjoying the experience.   Something real needs to take place in side your head, or heart, to make it something worth hanging on to.
I watched a number of my friends drop their belief in God over the years.  Sometimes they got dragged away by other distractions, sometimes the faith got in the way of other things, another mate just decided he didn’t need it any more. As for me, I have had my faith, in one form or another all my life.  I haven’t ever really been tempted to drop it, my faith is just part of who I am and it has grown and reshaped over the years depending on how open my heart is.
Perhaps another way to see it might be that Santa is something our kids grow out of, while faith is something you grow into.  If you stop watering the tree, or get distracted by other things, faith will then wilt and die, much like the fantasy of Santa.  It is somewhat ironic that kids refuse to believe in Santa, who they can see and touch and see some potential value in, while many choose to accept the reality of God, who remains unseen in a physical sense.  Perhaps we choose to ignore his gifts under our tree?