Advent Reflection 3- Feast of St. Nicholas

I don't know what post this picture this would be right for.  So here it is.

Today was the Feast of St. Nicholas.  We celebrated with shoes left outside our door last night that were swollen with goodies this morning. It is our way to deal with the Santa thing...to make it meaningful...to celebrate imagination...And Junia's face this morning made me understand why parents keep up the narrative even after the awe wears off.

Here is a reading from our Advent Reflection book that I thought captured this day beautifully...

"A desire to be truthful with children has made many people uncomfortable with one of the few myths retained in our cultic celebrations at christmastime, the concept of Santa Clause or St. Nicholas. On one hand we know in our very bones the power and magic of this figure- or certianly he would not be such a persistent fore in this season--but on the other hand we don't know how long we can or should allow children to believe in him or what it is that they should believe.

I don't want to get rid of Santa Claus. But I think that we need to  give our Santa clause, who has evolved out of a very ancient St. Nicholas, a closer examination. A myth is an exceptionally difficult thing to kill, for it continues to be devastatingly revealing even when we have tampered with it and changed its form y our rationalizations or our moralistic applications.  A figure who can endure with such tenacity ever since the fourth century, and with a stunning continuity of legends and similarity of iconographic representations in so many countries  has got to be real.  He may well be the most popular saint the world has ever known, whether he was ever real in history or not. His legends cannot be brushed aside as 'mere' myths because they live on into the present and refuse to die while stories in history on the other hand, deal with what is dead and past. Santa Clause is the father figure we all dream about and share in our collective unconscious. He is a type of God the Father, primal and powerful and, yes, real."


-Gertrude Meueller Nelson
From: O'Gorman, Thomas J, editor. An Advent Sourcebook, Liturgy Training Publications, Chicago, 1988.