I Support Santa (& Yes, I Believe In God)

OMG. It’s Christmas season. Like officially Christmas season where Thanksgiving is over and it’s ok to play Christmas music, turn on your Christmas lights and burn all those Christmas scented candles. Even though I haven’t actually put up any Christmas decorations yet and my mini pumpkins and fall candles are still embarrassingly on display for any visitors to see {this weekend…I’ve promised myself I’ll Christmas-ize my house this weekend}, this season is my happy place. I love Christmas.

What I don’t love is Christmas on Facebook.

I consider myself more on the side of very religious than not, where I am firmly set in my faith, my direction and every belief instilled in me since I was a child. We go to church regularly, I believe in God and I understand the true meaning of Christmas.

And oh.my.gosh. I’m still going to take my daughter to see Santa. Want to know more? Next year I plan to start Elf on the Shelf.

I know, right? WHAT am I thinking? HOW can I find this acceptable? So what I’m saying is that I think it’s ok to LIE to my daughter?

These are the types of comments I’ve noticed floating around Facebook the last few weeks. As an example, a girl I went to high school with who I really don’t keep in touch with other than exchanging sporadic likes on Facebook posted a question the other week. She asked her Facebook friend community what exactly Elf on the Shelf is because she was determining if she wanted to start it with her son this year.

HOLD UP, WAIT A MINUTE. You’d think she single-handedly crucified Jesus herself with some of the responses she received.

Why do we do this to each other? Whatever happened to the long lost phrase If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all? And to my fellow God-followers: do you really think your condemning words are the example you’re supposed to be setting? Is God really proud of your judgment and condemnation? I can support my answer with a number of Bible verses: no.

The posts I’ve seen surrounding the Santa and Elf on the Shelf debates are just plain…silly, really. Everyone has, without question, every right to his or her own opinion on the topic, and please, everyone carry on however you prefer. I don’t take an interest in whether anyone does or doesn’t partake in the Santa tradition or the Elf on the Shelf discipline/marketing scheme.

What I do have a growing interest in is why either party feels justified spouting off why what the other person is doing is wrong when their opinion was not asked. It’s Christmas season. Can’t we all just get along?

As a child I grew up believing in Santa. Ironically {or is it?}, my family didn’t celebrate Jesus’ birth any less. Every Christmas, with all the presents strewn throughout the family room, my parents had us sit through (or verbally read once old enough) the Christmas story (Luke 2:1-20). Every year my mom wrapped up the baby Jesus figurine from the nativity scene in the prettiest wrapping paper and it was the first present opened after the story was read. My sisters and I fought over opening this gift, so we ended up rotating who opened it each year. We then moved on to our presents from Santa.

I checked with both of my sisters and neither of them can ever recall being upset with our parents for “lying” to us about Santa’s existence. In fact, all of us remember believing in Santa, but none of us can remember with certainty how any of us learned he wasn’t actually real. At least in our house, no damage was done with this light-hearted tradition. Granted I did grow up in a household where trusting my parents was never something that was hard to come by for any other reason either.

The moral of this post is this: be nice, embrace this happy, festive time of year, and if someone’s poor attitude starts to get you down, pour yourself a glass of hot Gluhwein and count yourself thankful your temperament is happier than theirs.

Merry Christmas season to all, and cheers!