Santa doesn't need kids to be ‘good'
By Ronald J. Williams
 St Nicholas Center collection |
Different than many readers, reading the children's letters to Santa, was for me, a sad thing. That child after child noted to Santa, "I have been good." Sad that they found it necessary to say that they were "good" before expressing a Christmas wish. I guess I am sad that we have trained our children in this way.
St. Nicholas of Myra was a great, kind soul who secretly gave money to poor girls who did not have resources for a dowery, and eventually he gave money to many of the children he knew. But he never asked for even a thank-you for his generosity Santa Claus has become the successor prototype figure of St. Nicholas (St. has become Santa, and Nicholas has morphed into, simply, Claus) and personally, I take Santa Claus as an expression of God's freely given love.
Now, in the United States we have got this act of love mixed with the Nordic Father Christmas, where children who were not good were given a piece of coal, or something just as bad. We have placed on our children, a guilt trip by insisting that to get a gift from Santa they had to live by their parents definition of "good."
I grew up in the 1940s in a little town in Northwest Kansas. I do not ever remember a Santa figure or my parents or grandparents asking me if I had been good to receive a Christmas gift. Gifts, at Christmas, if they are true to the tradition of St. Nicholas, are given freely, a sign of Santa's love for the children and thus God's gracious love and generosity. Oh, that we would have had the grace to teach our children the same things. Christmas should not be a guilt producing, discipline control device, but rather should be a beautiful, enticing example of God's loving, wonderful love.
—Ronald J. Williams
By Ronald J. Williams, letter to The Mercury, Manhattan, Kansas, January 3, 2024. Permission pending.