"Santa" or "No-Santa"? That is the question...

I have a new son...this will be his first Christmas. Now, he is much too young to even acknowledge or even grasp the idea of Santa Clause, but the other day, I couldn't help but think about something. How am I going to handle the issue of Santa Clause?

My first thought was..."there doesn't seem to be any harm in a mysterious, gift-giver at Christmas"?

Immediately, my mind went another direction... "if I have to have a conversation one day with my son about how Santa Clause doesn't exist, will he immediately turn to me, call me on my deception, and ask me if Jesus is real, too."


One of the questions that Christians have had to answer for themselves is whether or not they choose to celebrate Christmas with the idea of Santa Clause. There's a wide range of opinion on the matter.

There's the "everything goes/it's all good/accept it all" crowd. Santa Clause is absolutely fine all the time...in fact, if you asked our kids, they would probably think we talk about Santa more than Jesus crowd.

Or, there's the the crowd that likes to point out that if you rearrange the letters in "S-A-N-T-A" you can spell "S-A-T-A-N." All joking aside, there are very genuine believers in Jesus who choose to keep Santa completely out of their families' celebration of Christmas. There are two very different sides to this coin.


Regardless of what side of the fence you lean toward, I would ask you to consider and give careful thought about how you choose to use the idea of Santa in your home, with your children, and in your celebration of Christmas (the celebration of the "Word becoming Flesh" - John 1). Here are 5 different people giving five different viewpoints about how Christians should handle the issue of Santa Clause.

Down with Santa - Thabiti Anyabwile
What We Tell Our Kids about Santa - Mark Driscoll
Thinking About Santa - Noel Piper
Santa, Strategically - Jennifer Wilkin
Santa Christ? - Sinclair Ferguson


As you can read, there is plenty of discussion about proper ways to include or not to include the idea of Santa in a Christian celebration of Christmas.

• Your thoughts?
• How have you handled this in your home?
• Have any of your thoughts been tweeked/changed after reading some of these articles?
• Do you think there is a potential danger in blindly accepting the very commercial idea of Santa?
• If you have incorporated Santa into your Christmas celebration, did you think critically about that choice or was it more of "that's what we did in my family growing up" thing and so we didn't give it much thought?

Merry Christmas...hope you forgive me if I sent you into an internal debate that you're not sure you had time for...