Indicting Santa Claus
Indicting Santa Claus for mental and moral incompetency seems such an outrageous storyline for one of the most endearing of Christmas movies. Yet it seems poor Santa is still being dragged to court in one form or another.
I've had a few conversations recently about the pros and cons of outing Santa to children. It usually causes me an internal smile as this is the time I get to defend Santa's right to be a valid belief system for young people, because for the rest of the year I spend my energy trying to defend Jesus' right to be a valid belief system for children who have grown to the cusp of individuation and are discovering what it means to become an adult.
I'm one of those people who think encouraging an acceptance of the fantastical, and supporting the belief in super-naturally benign beings is a great idea and should be guarded for as long as humanly possible. I understand and respect the counter-argument about not lying to our children. But I still come down on Santa's side because this world is dark enough without extinguishing yet another candle of hope.
I think teaching children that their behavior has consequences and that the concept of an omniscient being who cares what an individual does during the entire year is something worth extolling in a society that childishly lives in the moment and seems almost pathologically adverse to taking personal responsibility for any action.
As of this minute the national debt in America is $16,400,388,600,000 or $52,065 per citizen. I had to round down for the last 6 digits because it was rising so fast it was impossible to offer an accurate number. It is flying towards $16,388,700,000!
Whatever your political opinions I think we can all agree that an individual debt load of $52,065 is cause for concern. Or perhaps I'm just delusional?
Miracle on 34th Street was about the struggle between the "rational" adult consumerism of the mid 20th century and the "irrational" childish belief in Santa, and all that he brings to a society in ideas like fairness, equality, justice, kindness, and the miraculous.
For many of my friends my vocational endeavors to defend Jesus' existence is as ludicrous as defending Kris Kringle in a New York courthouse. But somethings deserve a hearing in our "instant gratification" driven society and I love this time of year because it offers through Santa and/or religious refocusing, the opportunity for all of us to pause for a day and consider what is laudable, valuable and just plain old-fashionably edifying for us and our family at the darkest time of the year.
Life is hard and we live in a time of concrete fears and an uncertain future. Perhaps Santa isn't the most fantastical idea we share this Christmas with our children. Perhaps loading the credit card up with yet more debt and promising ourselves we will tighten our belt in the new year is slightly more deserving of indictment and a court case to prove if we as a society are indeed mentally or morally competent to be allowed to influence children with our mentally unstable ways.
$52,065 is my wife's share of the national debt. I will confess I'm desperately trusting that there is someone "up there" who likes us enough to bail us out yet again.....
My wife and I pray that we will become parents soon. I plan on teaching my children that they have an obligation to believe in the impossible, the improbable and the irrational because not everything we can touch and measure in our broken society is laudable, like-able, or even love-able to me let alone my longed for children.
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