by Bert Meinders

Created on: December 13, 2009

I can't remember a time when I believed in Santa Claus. This is not to say that I never did, but by the age of seven, I knew who put the presents under the tree. I doubt that I was any more sceptical than other children; there was just too much disbelief to suspend. Besides, we (being of Dutch antecedents) had Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) and the similarity of the names was glaringly obvious. Dutch children get their gifts on the sixth of December, and Christmas is reserved for more serious matters. So I listened to the sermon and I noticed the words in the carols and came to conclusions early in life. I also noticed that the overwhelmingly Winter flavour of Christmas seemed incongruous in the early Summer, and that the traditional Christmas dinner (which we replaced with more appropriate fare) was neither necessary nor enjoyable.

"Christmas" is a slight abbreviation of "Christ's Mass". It is a celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, known as the Christ, from the Greek christos, meaning redeemer or saviour. Santa Claus is a corruption of Saint Nicholas, dressed on the red and white of the Coca-Cola Corporation and is associated indelibly with the festival known to some as Crassmas, in which parents are pressed to spend as much as they can afford, or even more, to buy increasingly expensive gifts for their friends and family, to throw elaborate parties and to forget the real significance of Christmas. Christmas Eve is the only time when it is considered acceptable, even normal, for people to attend church drunk. Christmas is a time when families traditionally get together, in many cases closer and for longer than they should. Ask any policeman who has to work over Christmas what this means in terms of extra work for him and his colleagues.

Christmas, also spelt Xmas for those who want to remove every reference to Christ from the season, has much to recommend it, if people act in the spirit of Christmas. Peace, generosity, goodwill, suspension of hostilities (as in 1914 on the Western Front), time spent with family and friends or with the poor or homeless or ill or otherwise unfortunate....    all this is good and satisfying. Free of the commercial pressure towards excess in all things, Christmas would be a good time for many more than it is now. Santa Claus is the fat and vulgar face of the false Christmas, the season of too much eating, too much drinking, the resurfacing of too many old conflicts and the making of too

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