Posted on 12/07/2009 11:45:27 AM PST by The Ignorant Fisherman
Parents, often without even realizing it, have been teaching their children the following things about Santa Claus:
SANTA IS OMNISCIENT He knows how children behave throughout the year. The familiar song says, "He knows if we've been good or bad." Also he knows exactly what children want for Christmas even if the child does not have an opportunity to tell him personally.
SANTA IS OMNIPOTENT No storm is too great to hinder Santa from performing his annual miracle of delivering gifts throughout the world. He also defies the laws of nature by flying and by coming down the narrowest (and hottest!) of chimneys! Nor should we forget his amazing ability to produce millions of gifts throughout the year. Is anything too hard for Santa? With Santa all things are possible!
SANTA IS OMNIPRESENT To visit every home in the world in one evening requires nothing less than omnipresence! Every child in the world can wake up in the morning and say, "Santa has been here! Santa was present in my home!" Prior to Christmas Santa also appears at hundreds of street corners and shopping centers throughout the country at the same time!
SANTA IS FAITHFUL You can always count on Santa! Santa never fails and he never breaks his word. When Santa makes a promise he keeps it! When he promises a child a gift, that child will never be disappointed. Children are fully persuaded that what Santa has promised he is able also to perform. The child that believes in Santa will not be put to shame! Santa is totally dependable and trustworthy!
SANTA IS ETERNAL Santa with his white beard and weather-beaten face is the very essence of eternity. Year after year goes by
(Excerpt) Read more at theignorantfishermen.com ...
Merry CHRISTmas!
Poor Saint Nick must be nodding his head in disapproval at what he has come to symbolize.
Here’s the real St. Nicholas :
Saint Nicholas : Agios [”saint”] Nikolaos [”victory of the people”]) (270 - 7 December 346) is the common name for Nicholas of Myra, a saint and Bishop of Myra (Demre, in Lycia, part of modern-day Turkey). Because of the many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker. He had a reputation for secret gift-giving, such as putting coins in the shoes of those who left them out for him, and thus became the model for Santa Claus, whose English name comes from the Dutch Sinterklaas.
His reputation evolved among the faithful, as is common for early Christian saints. In 1087, his relics were furtively translated to Bari, in southeastern Italy; for this reason, he is also known as, Nicholas of Bari.
The historical Saint Nicholas is remembered and revered among Catholic and Orthodox Christians. He is also honoured by various Anglican and Lutheran churches. Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, and children, and students in Greece, Belgium, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Russia, the Republic of Macedonia, Slovakia, Serbia and Montenegro. He is also the patron saint of Barranquilla, Bari, Amsterdam, Beit Jala, Siggiewi and Liverpool. In 1809, the New-York Historical Society convened and retroactively named Santa Claus the patron saint of Nieuw Amsterdam, the Dutch name for New York City. He was also a patron of the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine emperors, who protected his relics in Bari.
For his help to the poor, Nicholas is the patron saint of pawnbrokers; the three gold balls traditionally hung outside a pawnshop symbolize the three sacks of gold. People then began to suspect that he was behind a large number of other anonymous gifts to the poor, using the inheritance from his wealthy parents. After he died, people in the region continued to give to the poor anonymously, and such gifts were still often attributed to St. Nicholas.
A nearly identical story is attributed by Greek folklore to Basil of Caesarea. Basil’s feast day on January 1 is considered the time of exchanging gifts in Greece.
Nicholas, bishop of Myra circa 300 AD. Had a reputation for secret gift-giving. Clothed in red as befitted a bishop. Revered among Catholic and Orthodox Christians, honored by Lutherans and Anglicans. In the Dutch tongue Saint Nicholas becomes Sinterklaas, corrupted by the English of New Amsterdam/ New York into Santa Claus.
My kids, when small, heard the Nativity story and waited for Santa. As they got older, they figured out the truth.
The Nativity was and always will be the centerpiece of the Holiday.
My oldest son is studing for the Priesthood for the Anglican Church of America, my daughter and her husband the Coastie are youth leaders at their church, and the two little guys at home sing church songs on the way to their Christian Private School. I’m pretty sure the story of Santa has not had a negative spiritual impact any more then the tooth fairy.
Oh yeah, we let them Trick or Treat too....
Looks like you’ll be getting coal this year.
Agreed and somehow someway we turned out ok.
My kids too were able to discern the difference between a pleasant mythology and the TRVTH writ large.
I thought that the original Santa Claus was Sa’ami.
Wow. He needs to get a grip. The birth of Jesus was always at the center of our Christmas celebrations, but my children believed in Santa when they were small. It did not hurt them at all.
Lying to your children about Santa Claus is just plain wrong. It teaches them that it’s ok to lie for just any ol’ silly reason and certainly if everybody else is doing it. Sends the message that mom and dad can’t really be trusted. And why should parents who spend their hard-earned dollars and precious time buying gifts get the gratitude and respect due them.
My sister’s 3 children were never lied to about this and they always had extraordinary Christmas times and are terrific young adults. They did not suffer because they lived the truth.
I agree. Only very young children accept Santa, anyway. Eventually, their questions (why are there so many Santas at stores?, etc) become so many that they cannot believe in Santa anymore. Little kids have a different grip on reality than adults or older kids. They believe fairy tales and movies are real.
The Physics of Christmas
1) No known species of reindeer can fly, but there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified. While most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2) There are 2 billion children in the world (persons under 18), but since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children, that reduces the workload by 85% of the total - leaving 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there is at least one good child per house.
3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different times zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000 th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc. That means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, at tops, 15 miles per hour.
4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming each child get nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting the “flying reindeer” can pull TEN TIMES that normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison, this is four times the weight of the _Queen Elizabeth_II.
5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per second, each. In short, they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized in 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa meanwhile, will be subject to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by a 4,315,015 pound force.
In conclusion, if Santa ever DID deliver presents of Christmas Eve, he’s now dead. (This will be something you can tell your kids someday!)
If your goal is to put “Christ” back into Christmas then you are sorely mistaken. Since The Nazarene could NOT have been born anywhere near Dec 25th you are diluting the message of the risen Saviour.
On the other hand if one views this time of year as a reminder of cultural things and of a chance to rethink and reconnect then perhaps you will do well.
On a finer point ChristMAS refers to the death of the Saviour not his resurrection which leaves one in a bad position if they profess to be a beliver. The joy is in the resurrection. It is the basis of our faith (the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen).
those pictures of the kids with Santa are hilarious!!
What is your opinion of this article :
http://www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn55/christmas_evidence.htm
TITLE : Biblical Evidence Shows Jesus Christ Wasn’t Born on Dec. 25
Might as well post the entire article for all to read :
Biblical Evidence Shows Jesus Christ Wasn’t Born on Dec. 25
History convincingly shows that Dec. 25 was popularized as the date for Christmas, not because Christ was born on that day but because it was already popular in pagan religious celebrations as the birthday of the sun.
But is it possible that Dec. 25 could be the day of Christ’s birth?
“Lacking any scriptural pointers to Jesus’s birthday, early Christian teachers suggested dates all over the calendar. Clement. . . picked November 18. Hippolytus . . . figured Christ must have been born on a Wednesday . . . An anonymous document[,] believed to have been written in North Africa around A.D. 243, placed Jesus’s birth on March 28” (Jeffery Sheler, U.S. News & World Report, “In Search of Christmas,” Dec. 23, 1996, p. 58).
A careful analysis of Scripture, however, clearly indicates that Dec. 25 is an unlikely date for Christ’s birth. Here are two primary reasons:
First, we know that shepherds were in the fields watching their flocks at the time of Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:7-8). Shepherds were not in the fields during December. According to Celebrations: The Complete Book of American Holidays, Luke’s account “suggests that Jesus may have been born in summer or early fall. Since December is cold and rainy in Judea, it is likely the shepherds would have sought shelter for their flocks at night” (p. 309).
Similarly, The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary says this passage argues “against the birth [of Christ] occurring on Dec. 25 since the weather would not have permitted” shepherds watching over their flocks in the fields at night.
Second, Jesus’ parents came to Bethlehem to register in a Roman census (Luke 2:1-4). Such censuses were not taken in winter, when temperatures often dropped below freezing and roads were in poor condition. Taking a census under such conditions would have been self-defeating.
Given the difficulties and the desire to bring pagans into Christianity, “the important fact then . . . to get clearly into your head is that the fixing of the date as December 25th was a compromise with paganism” (William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, 1970, p. 62).
If Jesus Christ wasn’t born on Dec. 25, does the Bible indicate when He was born? The biblical accounts point to the fall of the year as the most likely time of Jesus’ birth, based on the conception and birth of John the Baptist.
Since Elizabeth (John’s mother) was in her sixth month of pregnancy when Jesus was conceived (Luke 1:24-36), we can determine the approximate time of year Jesus was born if we know when John was born. John’s father, Zacharias, was a priest serving in the Jerusalem temple during the course of Abijah (Luke 1:5). Historical calculations indicate this course of service corresponded to June 13-19 in that year (The Companion Bible, 1974, Appendix 179, p. 200).
It was during this time of temple service that Zacharias learned that he and his wife Elizabeth would have a child (Luke 1:8-13). After he completed his service and traveled home, Elizabeth conceived (verses 23-24). Assuming John’s conception took place near the end of June, adding nine months brings us to the end of March as the most likely time for John’s birth. Adding another six months (the difference in ages between John and Jesus) brings us to the end of September as the likely time of Jesus’ birth.
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