In the bleak midwinter

In the bleak midwinter,      frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron,     water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow,     snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, long ago.	Angels and archangels may     have gathered there, Cherubim and seraphim     thronged the air; But His mother only,     in her maiden bliss, Worshiped the beloved with a kiss.
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him,     nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away     when He comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter     a stable place sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.	What can I give Him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd,     I would bring a lamb; If I were a Wise Man,     I would do my part; Yet what I can I give Him:     give my heart.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim,     worship night and day, Breastful of milk,     and a mangerful of hay; Enough for Him,     whom angels fall before, The ox and ass and camel which adore.

 Christina Rossetti, 1872

The Truth sent from Above

Ralph Vaughan Williams, "Herefordshire Carol":

This is the truth sent from above, The truth of God, the God of love; Therefore don’t turn me from your door,    But hearken all both rich and poor.	And at that season of the year Our blest Redeemer did appear; He here did live, and here did preach, And may thousands he did teach.
The first thing which I do relate Is that God did man create; The next thing which to you I’ll tell Woman was made with man to dwell.	Thus He in love to us behaved, To show us how we must be saved; And if you want to know the way, Be pleased to hear what He did say.
And we were heirs to endless woes, Till God the Lord did interpose; And so a promise soon did run That He would redeem us by his Son.

There are more verses, including:

"Go preach the Gospel," now He said,
"To all the nations that are made!
And he that does believe on me,
From all his sins I'll set him free."

O seek! O seek of God above
That saving faith that works by love!
And, if He's pleased to grant thee this,
Thou'rt sure to have eternal bliss.

God grant to all within this place
True saving faith, that special grace
Which to His people doth belong:
And thus I close my Christmas song.

More Dickens Christmas

Christmastide at 600 College St. when I was young: candles in every street-facing window, a wreath on the front door and a festooned evergreen in the front window (first real, then later, artificial), large-format Christmas Ideals on the coffee table, Christmas cards taped to the kitchen wall by Mom, and more. Records came out, too. We had a recording of A Child's Christmas in Wales read by Dylan Thomas himself. The record I remember best was a 45rpm of Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge in Dickens' Christmas Carol. He had performed that role year after year on the radio in the 40s and 50s. Listening to the record was one of our family Christmas traditions. I transferred the recording to CD years ago and just found it among my collection of Christmas music. The original record sleeve:

 And this, provided by YouTube, is the recording:

The rightful king has landed...

C.S. Lewis on the Incarnation:

• 
  …the Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away there is nothing specifically Christian left. (God in the Dock)
• The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. (Miracles)
• In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down;…down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature he has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. (Miracles)
• The Incarnation…illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die, and which at one stroke covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if this is rejected. (Miracles)
• But supposing God became man—suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person—then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God…. But we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man, That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all. (Mere Christianity)
• Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” (Mere Christianity)

"Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days"

From Dickens' Pickwick Papers.

...[N]umerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilised nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy! How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken!

We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveler, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home! ....

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, Chapter 28.

Someone came to find us

Advent began this past weekend. Walter Russell Mead reflected on the meaning of Advent in "The Coming":

.... If there is no Christmas, there is no Cross, no answer to the problems of sin, separation, failure and pain. Advent is a time to think about what life would be like if we didn’t have faith in a Redeemer, a Savior who was ready, willing and able to complete the broken arc of our lives, forgive what is past and walk with us step by step to help us build something better in the time that is left.

Advent is a time to remember that we need something more than what we can summon with our own resources to make our lives work. It’s a time to remember how lost we would be if Someone hadn’t come to find us. .... The preparation for Christmas begins by reflecting on what kind of world this would be, and what kind of lives we would have, if Christmas had never come.

There are worse ways to start your preparation for Christmas than by using this prayer from the old Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer:

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

The Coming | Via Meadia

Pagan, or not?

I put out my Christmas wreath this weekend. I've known Christians who choose not to celebrate Christmas. Kevin DeYoung explains why at least some of the oft-cited reasons don't stand up. From "Is Christmas a Pagan Rip-off?":

We’ve heard it so many times that it’s practically part of the Christmas story itself.

The Romans celebrated their seven-day winter festival, Saturnalia, starting on December 17. It was a thoroughly pagan affair full of debauchery and the worship of the god Saturn. To mark the end of the winter solstice, the Roman emperor established December 25 as a feast to Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun). Wanting to make Christianity more palatable to the Romans and more popular with the people, the church co-opted these pagan festivals and put the celebration of the birth of their Savior on December 25. For whatever the Christmas holiday has become today, it started as a copycat of well-established pagan holidays. If you like Christmas, you have Saturnalia and Sol Invictus to thank.

That’s the story, and everyone from liberal Christians to conservative Christians to non-Christians seem to agree that it’s true.

Except that it isn’t. ....

...[T]here is good evidence that December 25 was not chosen because of any pagan winter holidays. This is the argument Andrew McGowan, of Yale Divinity School, makes in his article “How December 25 Became Christmas” (first published in Bible Review in 2002). Let me try to distill McGowan’s fine historical work by addressing three questions.

The three questions:

• When did Christians first start celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25?
• When was it first suggested that Christmas grew out of pagan origins?
• Why do we celebrate Christmas on December 25?

The answers.

Kevin DeYoung, "Is Christmas a Pagan Rip-off?," Gospel Coalition, December 15, 2020.

Marcionism

An ancient heresy returns again in support of political bigotry. From The Free Press:

.... Like a boil on the backside of the body politic, there has been an ugly irruption of Jew-hating foolishness over casting in the upcoming Netflix film Mary, about the life of Jesus’s mother. People are outraged—outraged!—that director D.J. Caruso cast an Israeli Jew, Noa Cohen, to play the title character. ....

...[E]very Christian knows from the Bible that Mary was a Jewish maiden visited by the Archangel Gabriel, who told her that, though a virgin, she would conceive by the Holy Spirit and bear Israel’s long-awaited messiah.

“Behold, the handmaid of the Lord,” she replied. “Be it done unto me according to thy word.” (Luke 1:38)

The Gospel of Matthew begins with a recitation of the long lineage of Jesus, to demonstrate that the Nazarene son of Mary descended from both Abraham and King David. This is not coincidence: It is necessary to establish Jesus’s messianic credentials according to the Hebrew Bible.

Of course Jews don’t accept this, but believe that the messiah is still to come. The point is simply that it is impossible to extricate Jesus and his mother from Judaism. ....

To deny the Jewishness of Jesus is not only to negate the clear and unambiguous testimony of Scripture but to render as nonsense the entire salvation narrative.

Indeed, as Jesus himself told the Samaritan woman, God sent salvation to all of humanity through the Jewish people. No Jews, no Jesus. Though from the Christian perspective, Jews today reject the divinity of Jesus, as did their ancestors—while from the Jewish perspective they have merely remained true to their covenant with God—followers of Jesus cannot reject the Jews without being guilty of a serious, even fatal, heresy.

That heresy is a very old one, and it is called Marcionism. Marcion was a wealthy second-century Christian who, under the influence of Gnosticism, taught that the God of the New Testament was not the God of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew god was, according to Marcion, a god of wrath; the Christian god was a god of love. These are two distinct deities, he said, and the Christian god is sovereign. ....

Marcionism was strongly condemned by the Church fathers, who defended the legitimacy and necessity of the Hebrew scriptures. In Marcionism, Christianity replaces Judaism; in Christian orthodoxy, Christianity fulfills Judaism. “Don’t misunderstand why I have come—it isn’t to cancel the laws of Moses and the warnings of the prophets,” said Jesus (Matthew 5:17). “No, I came to fulfill them and to make them all come true.” ....

...[W]hat all authoritative Christian traditions share is an irrevocable, undeniable testimony that God chose the Jewish people to make Himself known to all of humanity, and that without Hebrew Scripture and tradition, the Christian faith would make no sense at all. .... (more)

Rod Dreher, "On Mary and the Mob," The Free Press, Dec. 1, 2024.

Epiphany

"The star, which they saw in the east, went before them..."

The term Epiphany is taken from the Greek word for “manifestation” and is a date to celebrate the incarnation of Christ. In some denominations, the day is also known as Three Kings’ Day since it commemorates the “twelfth day of Christmas,” or twelve days after Jesus’ birth, when according to tradition the magi visited Mary, Joseph, and their child. (In the Bible, neither the number of “wise men” nor the date they arrived is specified.) ....

9 Things You Should Know About the Christian Calendar

"Strengthen me, O Lord, in good purposes"

Samuel Johnson, New Year's Day, 1772:

ALMIGHTY GOD, who hast permitted me to see the beginning of another year, enable me so to receive Thy mercy, as that it may raise in me stronger desires of pleasing Thee by purity of mind and holiness of Life. Strengthen me, O Lord, in good purposes, and reasonable meditations. Look with pity upon all my disorders of mind, and infirmities of body. Grant that the residue of my life may enjoy such degrees of health as may permit me to be useful, and that I may live to Thy Glory; and O merciful Lord when it shall please Thee to call me from the present state, enable me to die in confidence of Thy mercy, and receive me to everlasting happiness, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"Herod the king, in his raging..."

The carol mourns the death of the baby boys of Bethlehem when King Herod, having caught wind that one of them was destined to take over his job as king of the Jews, ordered their murder. The song itself was crafted for a medieval mystery play, performed annually in the city of Coventry from the late 12^th century until Protestants shut down such rituals in the late 16^th century. ....

...[T]he massacre of the babies of Bethlehem is commemorated each year as the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The feast is held every Christmastide on December 28 — today. The Innocents are venerated as the first Christian martyrs, for, in the words of St. Augustine, “they are the first buds of the Church killed by the frost of persecution; they died not only for Christ, but in his stead.”

Kayla Bartsch, "The Bloody Tale behind the Coventry Carol," National Review, December 28, 2023.

"To lay aside his crown for my soul"

More:

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
To lay aside his crown for my soul, for my soul,
To lay aside his crown for my soul.

To God and to the Lamb, I will sing, I will sing;
To God and to the Lamb, I will sing.
To God and to the Lamb who is the great I AM;
While millions join the theme, I will sing, I will sing;
While millions join the theme, I will sing.

And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on;
And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on.
And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing and joyful be;
And through eternity, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on;
And through eternity, I’ll sing on.

Then friends shall meet again, who have loved, who have loved,
Then friends shall meet again, who have loved;
Then friends shall meet again, in Jesus' presence, when
We'll meet to part no more, who have loved, who have loved,
We'll meet to part no more, who have loved.

Ye winged seraphs, fly! Bear the news, bear the news.
Ye winged seraphs fly! bear the news;
Ye winged seraphs fly! Like comets through the sky,
Fill vast eternity with the news, with the news,
Fill vast eternity with the news!

Anonymous; composite; 19th cent.
Tune: WONDROUS LOVE (6.6.6.3.6.6.6.6.6.3.)
American folk tune; The Southern Harmony, 1840

O that birth forever blessèd

Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see, evermore and evermore!

O that birth forever blessèd, when the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving, bore the Savior of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face, evermore and evermore!

O ye heights of heaven adore Him; angel hosts, His praises sing;
Powers, dominions, bow before Him, and extol our God and King!
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
Every voice in concert ring, evermore and evermore!

Christ, to Thee with God the Father, and, O Holy Ghost, to Thee,
Hymn and chant and high thanksgiving, and unwearied praises be:
Honor, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory, evermore and evermore!
(Prudentius, 5^th Century)

Awake!

Almighty God, give us grace, that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life, (in the which Thy son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility;) that in the last day when He shall come again in His glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through Him who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost now and ever. Amen. (Thomas Cranmer)

Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof. (Romans 8)

That day, when sent in glory by the Father,
The Prince of Life His blest elect shall gather;
Millions of angels about Him flying,
While all the kindreds of the earth are crying,
And He, enthroned above the clouds, shall give
His last just sentence, who must die, who live.
(Henry Vaughan)

Norman Rockwell for Christmas

The dawn will break

Reflecting on the traditional liturgy as Christmas approaches:

“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” derives from a far older cycle of Advent prayers called the O Antiphons. From the eighth century, the Western church has prayed these antiphons during Evening Vespers in the final days of Advent (December 17-23), calling out to the imminent Christ by a different title each evening. The vocative “O” resembles, in the words of theologian Oliver Treanor, “the womb of the Virgin in late pregnancy, round and full of Christ,” and each prayer calls out to the imminent Christ by a different title: O Wisdom, O Adonai, O Root of Jesse, O Key of David, O Rising Sun, O King of Nations, and finally, O Emmanuel.

These different prophetic titles given to Christ offer hearers multiple ways to receive the news of the gospel—that Christ came to atone for the sins of his people. Rich in symbolic imagery, history, and poetry, the O Antiphons speak to the mysterious and paradoxical nature of the Christmas story, in which an all-powerful God enters human history not in a blaze of almighty glory, but as a helpless child, out of wedlock, wrapped in swaddling clothes. ....

In the final title given to Christ in the antiphons, Emmanuel—God-with-us—humans are joined with God forever, as the hyphenation suggests. That God would take on human frailty, would suffer with humanity and in human flesh, is the basis upon which the logic of creation is radically upended: the wolf will live with the lamb, the last will be the first, and the meek will inherit the earth. In this new order even the most intractable human situations, in which hate or vengeance or greed seem destined to persist, become ripe for change. ....

We are far from the first, and won’t be the last, generation to call out for God to, as one of the antiphons puts it, “come and save man whom you made from clay.” The promise alluded to in the prayers is not that the darkness will never close in on us, but that when it does, the dawn will break too, even in a manger, even on a cross, even in a tomb. .... (more)

Megan Dent, "When Obscure Christmas Liturgies Become Relevant Anew," The Dispatch, December 17, 2023.

Christmas past

From Dickens' Pickwick Papers.

...[N]umerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilised nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy! How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken!

We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveler, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home! ....

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, Chapter 28.

The hinge of history

On the importance of knowing whose birth we will celebrate on Christmas (John 1:14):

Who then was Jesus, really?

You cannot even ask the question without implicitly choosing among answers. The very wording of the question, in the past tense ("Who was Jesus?") or the present ("Who is Jesus?"), presupposes its own answer. For those who believe his claim do not say that he was divine, but is divine. Divinity does not change or die or disappear into the past. Furthermore, if he really rose from the dead, he still is, and is very much alive today.

The Importance of the Issue

The issue is crucially important for at least six reasons.

1. The divinity of Christ is the most distinctively Christian doctrine of all. A Christian is most essentially defined as one who believes this. And no other religion has a doctrine that is even similar. Buddhists do not believe that Buddha was God. Muslims do not believe that Muhammad was God: "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet."

2. The essential difference between orthodox, traditional, biblical, apostolic, historic, creedal Christianity and revisionist, modernist, liberal Christianity is right here. The essential modernist revision is to see Christ simply as the ideal man, or "the man for others"; as a prophet, rabbi, philosopher, teacher, social worker, psychologist, psychiatrist, reformer, sage or magician—but not God in the flesh.

3. The doctrine works like a skeleton key, unlocking all the other doctrinal doors of Christianity. Christians believe each of their many doctrines not because they have reasoned their own way to them as conclusions from a theological inquiry or as results of some mystical experiences, but on the divine authority of the One who taught them, as recorded in the Bible and transmitted by the church.

If Christ was only human, he could have made mistakes. Thus, anyone who wants to dissent from any of Christ's unpopular teachings will want to deny his divinity. And there are bound to be things in his teachings that each of us finds offensive—if we look at the totality of those teachings rather than confining ourselves to comfortable and familiar ones.

4. If Christ is divine, then the incarnation, or "enfleshing" of God, is the most important event in history. It is the hinge of history. It changes everything. If Christ is God, then when he died on the cross, heaven's gate, closed by sin, opened up to us for the first time since Eden. No event in history could be more important to every person on earth than that.

5. There is an unparalleled present existential bite to the doctrine. For if Christ is God, then, since he is omnipotent and present right now, he can transform you and your life right now as nothing and no one else possibly can. He alone can fulfill the psalmist's desperate plea to "create in me a clean heart. O God" (Ps 51:10). Only God can create; there is even a special word in Hebrew for it (bara').

6. And if Christ is divine, he has a right to our entire lives, including our inner life and our thoughts. If Christ is divine, our absolute obligation is to believe everything he says and obey everything he commands. If Christ is divine, the meaning of freedom becomes conformity to him.

Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, IVP, 1994, pp. 151-152.

"Lo, He comes..."

Advent is a time about the "already but not yet": the time between the coming of Messiah and the time when He comes again. Three prayers composed for this season:

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which Thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when He shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through Him who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

O LORD, raise up, we pray Thee, Thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, Thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with Thee and the Holy Ghost, be honour and glory, world without end. Amen.

ALMIGHTY God, we beseech Thee, grant unto Thy people grace that they may wait with vigilance for the advent of Thy Son our Lord, that when He shall arise from Thy right hand to visit the earth in righteousness and Thy people with salvation, He may not find us sleeping in sin, but diligent in Thy service, and rejoicing in Thy praises, that so we may enter in with Him unto the marriage of the Lamb; through His merits, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

St Nicholas Day

Today was St. Nicholas Day. Kevin DeYoung on "Who Was St. Nicholas?":

The unsatisfying answer to the title of this post is that we don’t know as much as we would like. We know that a bishop named Nicholas existed, that he had a great influence on his homeland, and that he probably died on December 6. While we should be careful to separate fact from fiction, there are elements of the Nicholas story we can know—and what can be known is worth retelling.

According to the best estimates, Nicholas was born around AD 280 in Patara, in Asia Minor. He later became bishop of Myra in modern-day Turkey. Nicholas, it seems, died about 343 on or near December 6. ....

The most famous story involved three girls who were so destitute that they were going to be forced into a life of prostitution. But Nicholas threw three bags of gold through the window as dowries for the young women.

Over time, Saint Nicholas became the patron saint of nations like Russia and Greece, cities like Fribourg and Moscow, and of children, sailors, unmarried girls, merchants, and pawnbrokers (the three gold balls hung outside pawn shops are symbolic of the three bags of gold). ....

.... Luther rejected the saints’ days, believing they were built upon legends and superstitions (and a virulent strain of moralism we might add). In Germany, Luther replaced Saint Nicholas’ Day with a different holiday, Christ Child, or Christkindl. Ironically, Kriss Kringle which derived from Luther’s Christ Child holiday, has become just another name for St. Nicholas.

The cult of St. Nicholas virtually disappeared in Protestant Europe, with the exception of one country: the Netherlands. If you love Christmas with all the trappings of Santa Claus and stockings and presents, thank the Dutch. If you despise all that, try to ignore my last name for the time being. The Puritans had done away with St. Nicholas and banned Christmas altogether. But the Dutch held on to their tradition and brought it with them to the New World. In the Netherlands Sint Nicolaas was contracted to Sinterklaas. ....

At any rate, it is easy to see how Sinterklaas evolved in America to Santa Claus. Santa Claus became the Santa we know in the United States only after the poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas” was written in 1823. Possibly the best known verses ever written by an American, the poem has greatly influenced the tradition of Santa in the English speaking world and beyond.

How should Christians relate to the traditions of Santa Claus? C.S. Lewis embraced them and so included Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Other Christians, fearing syncretism, stay clear of Santa, reindeer, and a tree full of presents. I’ll leave it to you and your family to form you opinions on observing the Christmas holiday (see Rom. 14:1, 5-6). ....

But if you have a lot of Santa Claus around, why not use him to your benefit and talk about the real St. Nicholas. We don’t know a lot about him, but we know he lived and was revered. According to legend—one of those stories that probably isn’t true, but should be—when Nicholas was little boy he would get up early in the morning to go to church and pray. One morning, the aging priest had a vision that the first one to enter the church in the morning should be the new bishop of Myra. When Nicholas was the first to enter, the old priest, obeying the vision, made the young boy bishop right on the spot. But before he consecrated Nicholas a bishop, the priest asked him a question. “Who are you, my son?” According to tradition, the child whose legend would one day become Santa Claus replied, “Nicholas the sinner.” Not bad for a little boy. .... (more)

Kevin DeYoung,"Who Was St. Nicholas? Clearly Reformed, December 6, 2023.