Yes, it’s fine, in this modern day, if you want to emphasize the St. Nicholas version of Santa Claus. It’s also a fine thing if you want to play up the Sunblom version of Santa Claus as well. I don’t find rejecting either one as particularly bad, but what I object to is rejection of Santa Claus’ materialism of excess for the sake of the materialism of scientism: that he doesn’t exist because of certain universal physical laws that we know to be true.
Fairy-tales aren’t valued because of their truthfulness but in their value as a vehicle for truth-illustration. Denounce Santa as a symptom of Keynesian easy credit and the Industrial Revolution all you’d like, but don’t denounce him because he’s not real. Of course he isn’t real, yet it does children no good to reject him just because he’s impossible. It just so happens in this universe that Santa Claus is not particular to us—Santa Claus is, truthfully, not impossible because God is not impossible.
Below is a quote from G.K. Chesterton’s “The Other Stocking,” stolen from here.
What has happened to me has been the very reverse of what appears to be the experience of most of my friends. Instead of dwindling to a point, Santa Claus has grown larger and larger in my life until he fills almost the whole of it. It happened in this way.
As a child I was faced with a phenomenon requiring explanation. I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking. I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it. I had not worked for them, or made them or helped to make them. I had not even been good–far from it.
And the explanation was that a certain being whom people called Santa Claus was benevolently disposed toward me. What we believed was that a certain benevolent agency did give us those toys for nothing. And, as I say, I believe it still.
I have merely extended the idea.
Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.
Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now, I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea.
Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic goodwill.
2 Comments
Quite so. Every culture has a mythology that establishes what’s important. I might argue with the culture, but not the principle of mythology itself.
Tolkein’s Middle-earth was a mythologizing of Christianity in another universe. I haven’t read Lord of the Rings yet but I find the idea of “myth as truthiness” fascinating, especially one that’s so detailed as Tolkein’s.