Youngblood
Santa is beautiful
By Kim Arveen M. Patria
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:22:00 12/30/2008
Filed Under: Religion & Belief, Belief (Faith), Children
I broke my youngest sister’s heart last week. She came home from her Christmas party eager to show my two other sisters her new Barbie doll, which was supposedly a gift from Santa Claus, to whom she had written her Christmas wish. My devilish self took over and, with a grin on my face, I shattered a six-year-old’s image of a man in red lovingly wrapping a Christmas gift especially for her by telling her the doll came from Mama and Papa.
To my disappointment, she didn’t cry. Instead she stared blankly at the bare wall behind me, lost in thought and probably finding it hard to understand — worse, accept — the idea. I rued my bullying attitude.
When Mama and Papa came home together at seven, when they are usually met by excited little girls who tell enthusiastic stories even only with their bright eyes, my regret grew worse. I guess parents hate the day when, with so much excitement, they finally introduce themselves as Santa and their children are dumbfounded rather than thankful. And I suspect that parents start to go light on the Christmas presents after the Santa confrontation. Or maybe after discovering the mystery behind Santa, children start not to be as excited as before when opening the gifts wrapped for them.
We should have always known that Santa lived with us at home, taking clues from the old carol, “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” which we sang as children. Who, after all, will surely find out if we were naughty or nice but those who are with us every day? But most of us suffer from hyperopia, refusing to see things that are near and opting to find far-off mysteries and preferring them as explanations. Thus, it is easier for us to believe in an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent entity capable of knowing our Christmas wish, determining whether or not we are worthy of such gift and providing for that gift, if indeed we are worthy. It would be easier to accept if we were told that Santa is God. But to be told that Santa is our parents — mere human beings we see constantly at war with their demons, incessantly struggling against problems, and often failing to overcome them — is to be forced to bite off more than we can chew.
Throughout the world, we can see how people refuse to let go of the belief in Santa Claus and similar entities. The Romans had La Befana, a good witch who was supposed to accompany the three kings but having failed to do so, resolved to visit children at Christmas and give gifts to good ones and bags of ashes to bad ones. In Germany, they wait for Knecht Ruprecht, a man dressed in animal skins, to deliver presents. Of course, there is Saint Nicholas, the saint closely associated with the modern Santa, who is depicted as a bishop on a white horse often accompanied by Black Peter, an elf who whips naughty children. Even when Pope Paul VI removed the feast of Saint Nicholas from the Roman Catholic calendar due to lack of information about his life, people passed on the tradition. The Germans even ignored Christkindl (meaning Christ-child, from which the tradition Kriss Kringle is derived) as the gift-giver on Christmas, preferring a jolly, fat, old man in red who delivers gifts through the chimney over a baby boy (however holy) who crawls to people’s doorsteps, leaving gifts for them on his birthday.
Myths, legends and folklore are often needed to fill gaps in human understanding. And there are so many gaps, so many things we do not yet understand. Nowadays, there is a lack of myths, legends and folklore to sustain our desire to live. There are so many things that we abhor — things that we understand and yet refuse to believe in or accept — and so we need to look for or create things that we look up to or desire.
I took up Philosophy of Religion in the first semester and was exposed to many arguments for and against the existence of God. I concede that my God is a God of the Gaps — a god human beings employ only until the best explanations to certain phenomena are found, a god who is always only the best explanation because no other plausible explanation can be found.
But I still believe in this God, not because I can prove his existence but because I find the existence of this God beautiful. I go to church and pray because I like the idea that there is possibly Someone or Something out there who can hear me and who answers me in ways I may not recognize. I will not say that I believe in God because I know He exists, since the God I believe in is transcendent, beyond human comprehension, and therefore his existence can never be ascertained.
Taking off from Wittgenstein, I would rather say that the existence of the God I believe in is a certainty (a hinge), having taken the substrata of our belief systems such that if this belief were demolished, a paradigm shift would occur. More importantly, I would say that I believe in God because such belief is useful, especially when you are running out of things to believe in and live by. In the words of Saint Anselm, “I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand.”
I demythologized Santa Claus at a young age but growing up, I had to relearn the faith. In the same manner that I have to believe that my God is, that there is good in humanity, that my life has a purpose and meaning, I have to believe that there is Santa Claus, not because it is a necessary belief, but because it is beautiful.
There is joy in opening a present from someone you know, but imagine the feeling of opening a gift from someone you don’t know. More overwhelming, indeed, is opening a gift from someone you are not capable of knowing, a gift from a person or being who knows you and holds you important even if you don’t know him. I am afraid I have taken away this kind of joy from Baby George, the bright-eyed girl who never fails to gives us smiles as well as the reasons and desire to live every day.
Kim Arveen M. Patria, 19, is a journalism student at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City.
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