Why I don’t lie to my children about Father Christmas

Wherein Santa is fed to the algorithms

On the twelfth day, dear readers, allow me to wish you one last Happy Christmas. You may keep your Janus-faced Hogmanays of the secular Kalendar should you wish. I shall make the most of the last day before the tree comes down. You will have my new year greetings on the older date – kept from Saxon times until the eighteenth century – of 25 March, the day the world was made, the day the Lord entered it, the day He died in it, and, by no coincidence, the day when Tolkien had Sauron defeated.

For now, let us return to one of the great figures of this Feast. Not as great as Our Lord or Lady, granted, but great in his way. A man of industry and charity, and no less of efficiency, who divvies his yearly work by hemisphere, visiting the children of the West on Christmas Eve and the East today, on the Eve of the Epiphany. To the good he brings gifts, to the bad – well, that would be a cultural matter. A Ukrainian friend tells me that the naughty ones there get a stick from St Nick, fit for beating. That tells us something of his character, too, for while he may be better known for his jollity and belly-laughs, he has a sterner side: stern enough to strike a heretic in Council, or so the legends say. Even if he never really punched Arius at Nicaea, it seems he was known as the sort of man who might.

St Nicholas was a fighter when he walked this world and is a fighter still. His mode of combat is subtler now than thumps on noses. Nowadays, he is one of the great generals in the company of saints. And he is very much real. There are intelligent spirits who exercise agency in this world, they are at war, and St Nicholas is among them.

Lest more earthly-minded readers reel at this assertion, allow me to illustrate by counter-example. Take the recent spate of domestic enemy activity this Christmastide: men ploughing vehicles into crowds, planting explosive, vandalising churches and synagogues. The security services immediately react by denying any commonality or organisation to these assaults, for to do so would impugn them for failing in their counter-terrorism duties. Yet as the signs and tokens these supposed lone wolves have adopted unfurl in the media – the pennants they fly and livery they wear – it becomes clear that, whether part of a terrorist organisation or not, they serve a liege greater than themselves who unites them in common purpose. An idea, you may call it, or an ideology: no matter, it is a non-physical reality (unless you want to say that ideas are not real?) which captures the minds and loyalties of men and drives them, over the span of generations, even centuries and millennia, to a certain and reasoned end. It possesses motive and means. Though it works through many minds, they are all assimilated to what one might call a greater mind, a mind of its own. An extra-material intelligence, if you will. Or, in the old money, a daemon.

This diversion brings us back to our old friend in the North Pole. For the daemons, distortions of divine intellect, fell from the ordered ranks of angels in Day One. Thereafter, it would be the work of saint to replace their empty formations in the celestial battle-line. So, through Christ’s adoption of our humanity, His transfiguration of it with the primal Divine Light, His harrowing of Hell, Resurrection and uplifting of it at His Ascension, He wins for us mortals the right to join the immortal host and even outrank them. Mere humans, joined with God in Christ, come to marshal the spiritual powers.

This is just how Father Christmas works. Compare his modus operandi to that of the Enemy. Like them, he captures human imaginations. Like them, he works through people to achieve his Commanding Officer’s intent. But while the Enemy works through men with trucks and tanks, bombs, guns and knives, St Nicholas works through gifts in stockings and under trees, through the glass of sherry and Rudolph’s carrot, through cheesy sleigh bell anthems and tales of elves and chimneys. And I say that his weapons and his way of war and better and stronger than the Enemy’s. I say that they will win. Of course I do. I am a Christian.

Only atheists need worry about lying to their children about Father Christmas. I simply tell mine the truth. He is real.