(Photo from http://www.catholic.org/saints)

Happy Feast of St. Nicholas!

I hope your shoes were full this morning.  I was kind of hoping for the money flying in through the window.  Just kidding I should be the one throwing money to the poor.  I was reading up last night on poverty and realized that in the majority of the world, my blue-collar family is considered rich.  That put things into perspective and has me on the search for meaningful ways to help the poor.  But back on to the topic of Santa.

I know people who do not like to have the tradition of Santa as part of their Christmas celebration and I can respect and understand that.  Christmas is about Jesus being the best gift we could ever hope for.  We celebrate the preparation time of Advent with candles and prayers.  We wrap up all of our baby Jesus’ and hide them away until Dec 24th. Then on Christmas Eve we open them up and place them throughout the house at all of the manger scenes.  We celebrate midnight mass and have birthday cake for breakfast Christmas morning.  My kids know that Christmas is about Jesus.

We do include Santa in our celebration.  He visits us at our extended family gathering on Christmas Eve and later when the kids are sleeping he drops off some gifts.  When they are still young and start to ask about this big, jolly,  strange man we tell them that Santa is the spirit of St. Nicholas. They learn about St. Nicholas on his feast day with books, movies, and of course they even put their shoes out to get some goodies.  As they get older and realize how it really works they laugh and smile and share in the secret.

I promise they are not scared for life because of the Santa tradition.  I do believe if we left out the part about St. Nicholas or even celebrated Christmas as a holiday for Santa and forgot that it is actually about Jesus our Savior that people would be scared and left empty.  Then it really just becomes a day to accumulate more stuff.  Giving and even receiving without love is empty.  And God is love so without Him Santa is just a big creepy elf who supposedly breaks into houses through chimneys and leaves presents for children.

Keep Christ in Christmas and in your heart!