Santa Claus and how not to give gifts

John Barclay unpacks the nature of gift-giving and finds Santa’s list is moralising in comparison to an older unconditional way.

John Barclay

John Barclay is Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University. He researches the history and thought of early Christianity and early Judaism.

A Santa tiptoes in a darkened room carrying a lamp and holding up a finger in a gesture of silencing

Anderson W Rangel on Unsplash.

Christianity is a religion centered on the notion of gift. It is no accident that Christmas, linked with what Christians consider the ultimate gift - the birth of Jesus, is a festival of gift-giving. All sorts of historical and cultural traditions have accumulated around this festival, for good and ill, but one, it seems to me, has become especially problematic: the myth of Santa Claus. The form of giving we associate with Santa Claus is the very opposite of what counts, in the Christian tradition, as a good gift. Here’s how.

In the English-speaking world, Santa Claus (originally St Nicholas) is the man in the red coat and white beard to whom children address their requests for presents. For many, he becomes a bit like God, and as such, shapes their image of God as normally absent, occasionally useful, and generally benign. But if Santa is the distributor of gifts at Christmas, two things mark his giving: first, he gives according to merit; second, his giving is one-way and one-off, creating no relationship of trust, love, or obligation.

The famous Santa song is better known in North America than in the UK, but it has lasted long in the popular imagination. It has also shaped our ideas of gift-giving. Santa, you will recall, has a list of who’s been ‘naughty or nice’, and is using that list to direct his gifts. He is all-seeing and all-knowing (‘he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake’), so his merit-judgments are unfailingly correct: he ‘knows if you’ve been bad or good’ – so ‘be good for goodness sake’! Santa’s gifts, in other words, are merited and conditioned. At one level, this is an adult ploy to get children to behave at Christmas. But at another, it reflects a remorselessly moralizing society, quick to judge who is deserving of praise or blame.

As Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in The Tyranny of Merit, we have allowed the notion of ‘merit’ to govern so many aspects of our society that those who miss out on social and economic success are led to believe that it is really their fault. Santa is the projection of our sense that nothing good comes our way unless we somehow deserve it.

The other feature of Santa’s giving is that it is all over in a trice: it creates no relationship and establishes no long-term connection. The children who write letters asking for presents are not encouraged to enquire after Santa’s wellbeing during the rest of the year. There is no friendship, no commitment, just one-way gifts that arrive without reciprocity or interpersonal depth. That fits Western individualism, where we dislike the constraints created by long-term relationships. We will take a gift ‘with no strings attached’ because thereby we retain our autonomy, our power to choose, our independence.

This was a gift ‘with strings attached’ – not unwelcome new obligations that forced them to do what they hated, but strings of love that enabled them to be better and fuller versions of themselves.

he Christmas event was originally understood as a gift of a very different kind – in fact the inverse of the Santa-gift. What the early Christians celebrated about the gift of Jesus was that it was completely unconditioned: it was given without regard to merit or desert. Even in ancient times that was an unusual, even a bizarre, form of gift: surely it would make better sense to give to those who were worthy of the gift? But what the Gospel writers and St Paul celebrated was that the gift took effect in unexpected, undeserving places – with uneducated fishermen, with women as much as men, with non-Jews as well as Jews, with the social underdogs and the morally dubious.

This was a gift that had nothing to do with merit: it was given irrespective of worth and in the absence of worth. Paul the persecutor received this gift; so did Mary, a village teenager; so did Peter, who let Jesus down time after time; so did idolatrous non-Jews; so did Zacchaeus (a tax-collector – about as popular as a loan shark today)). This was not because the gift was given randomly. It was a strategic policy to make the gift available to all. As an unconditioned gift, not dependent on gender, cultural background, social level, or moral achievement, the gift of the ‘good news’ belonged to no-one – and could go to everyone.

As a result, the early Christians formed new kinds of communities that crossed most social boundaries, and excluded no one on the basis that they were not good enough to join.

And was this a ‘Santa gift’ in the sense of creating no relationship, no ties, no expectations? Far from it! The gift of Christ was understood to transform those who received it, because ultimately it was the gift not of a thing but of a person. Where Santa disappears for eleven months of the year, the Christians found that Jesus stuck around, not as a threat but as a transformative presence (in the form of ‘the Spirit’), who slowly, subtly, but definitively made them different than what they were before. This was a gift ‘with strings attached’ – not unwelcome new obligations that forced them to do what they hated, but strings of love that enabled them to be better and fuller versions of themselves. The Christ-gift drew its recipients, as theologians would later say, into the life of God, which is the best imaginable place for humans to be.

So, how might you give gifts differently this Christmas? Well, you could go beyond ‘the usual suspects’ and include some you would not normally include on your giving-list; why not reach out, with some gesture of goodwill, to someone with whom you have had a difficult relationship this year? You could try to make your gifts more personal, as a token of who you are and who they are, and you could make an effort to continue the friendship beyond the ‘once a year’ gesture. And if someone gives to you and you haven’t thought to give to them - a common source of embarrassment - no problem: take it as an invitation to friendship, to which you can always respond at some other time and in some other way. There is always an opportunity for change and growth.

An unconditioned gift that changes who you are - liberating and transformative, underserved and perpetually effective. There might be reasons why we prefer the ‘no commitment’ gifts of Santa Claus, but we also know that the most meaningful gifts are personal; they create or sustain ties of friendship; even if they are things, they represent an interpersonal commitment of love. Christmas is always a mixed blessing, but it is not helped by the Santa songs (or, indeed, by some terrible lines in Christmas carols!). But at its origin it carries the tune of a different kind of gift, which takes no account of desert but changes its recipients in ways they can never forget.

Article

Advent

Christmas culture

Joy

Poetry

20 December 2024

6 min read

The Advent poets who can’t wait until the world is sane

Tennyson to Eliot, Rossetti to L’Engle, find despair doesn’t preclude joy.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Beyond a misty and raindrop streaked window, a colourful triangle shape emerges.

Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.

After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, critics began to notice a change in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Some thought this was for the worse, that Eliot’s newfound faith dimmed his literary powers, making his usually impenetrable style more conventional. But there is a less cynical view. I think, instead, that his conversion brought a sense of clarity and purpose to his poetry. I think what really happened is that, like many Christian converts before and after him, he found a sense of joy.

Nowhere better can we find that distinctly Christian sense of joy than in Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’, an Advent poem recounting Jesus’s birth from the point of view of the magi travelling to meet him. Like many of my favourite Advent poems, ‘Journey of the Magi’ is not straightforwardly cheerful, instead dwelling on the idea of alienation. The last stanza of the poem in particular is devoted to the magi’s confusion at returning to their old life after witnessing the miracle of Christ’s birth:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

It’s hard not to read these lines and imagine that Eliot himself might have experienced a feeling of alienation, as a new convert, when looking back on his old life. And yet, the magi’s sense of being ‘no longer at ease’ in their old home, of being among ‘an alien people’, is not something that only converts experience. All of us, whether we are converts or reverts, whether we were brought up in the Christian faith or are still contemplating it with uncertainty, have a moment when we realise that believing in Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection radically changes the way we look at the world.

And conversion isn’t something that just happens once. Every year, during Advent, we are asked to meet despair with joy. For those of us living in the northern hemisphere, we’re specifically asked to do this in the darkest and coldest time of the year, when nature looks so gloomy and unwelcoming. As Christina Rossetti puts it in one of our country’s most beloved Christmas hymns, Jesus comes not at a time of flourishing nature, but rather ‘in the bleak midwinter’, when the earth is ‘hard as iron’ and water frozen ‘like a stone’. Just as we persevere in our yearly hope that spring will come again, so too we are called to renew our conversion of heart each Advent, waiting in hope for Christ’s birth.

But hope doesn’t have to mean blind optimism. The older I’ve become, the more I’ve come to think that rejoicing during Advent doesn’t have to involve unadulterated cheerfulness. Grief has its place within joy, as counterintuitive as that may seem. In fact, Advent is an opportunity to cultivate the virtue of hope in spite of grief, and in spite of the evils that we see in the world. ‘Were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?’, ask the magi. The answer is both. Each year Christ’s birth reminds us that faith requires us to die to our old selves. For some, this means having uncomfortable conversations with family or friends who don’t understand their conversion to the faith. For others, it means facing illness or death of a loved one or other kinds of trauma without giving in to despair.

None of this is easy, of course. Clinging to hope in dark times can truly feel like ‘bitter agony’, as Eliot writes. And yet, as one of the magi says in the final line of Eliot’s poem, ‘I should be glad of another death’. When we die to our selves, we also experience a new birth in Christ. Even as we celebrate his birth, we are reminded of his death on the cross for us, of the fact that he so loved us that he was willing to bear unbearable pain for our sake.

That kind of love, although it doesn’t remove all the sources of suffering in our daily life, does call for rejoicing. Another wonderful Advent poem, Madeleine L’Engle’s ‘First Coming’, emphasises the necessity of joyfulness in the face of a corrupted world. L’Engle begins by reminding us, stanza after stanza, that Jesus didn’t wait for humanity to become perfect before coming to us: ‘He did not wait till the world was ready’, she begins, before adding, ‘He did not wait for the perfect time’, ‘He did not wait till hearts were pure’. Rather, Christ came ‘in joy’, to ‘a tarnished world of sin and doubt’, right ‘when the need was deep and great’.

L’Engle ends ‘First Coming’ by encouraging us to imitate Christ not just in his patience, but also in accepting joy now, not when we world finally stops being rife with sin and pain:

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

We can’t wait until ‘the world is sane’ to be joyful. Joy is remembering that Christ really did come ‘to share our grief’, no matter how seemingly unbearable it may be. Lord Tennyson expresses a similar sentiment in his poem In Memoriam, an elegy written after the loss of his dear friend Arthur Hallam. He admits that the pain at his friend’s death is so intense that, as Christmas is drawing near, he almost wishes ‘no more to wake’, and for his ‘hold on life’ to ‘break’. Then, he hears the sounds of bells:

But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll'd me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.

Happy memories of Christmas bells from childhood are mixed with pain for Tennyson, bringing him ‘sorrow touch’d with joy’. That’s what all the best Advent poems, from Tennyson to Eliot, From Rossetti to L’Engle, show us: that sorrow doesn’t preclude joy. In the weeks leading up to Christ’s birth, it’s normal to dwell on both birth and death; Advent can be a season for both somberness and merrymaking. Most of all, Advent is a time for prayer, that our hearts may be filled with the knowledge that Christ loves us even in our sorrow, and that the very knowledge of Christ’s love may in turn fill our hearts with joy.

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