Explainer
Christmas culture
Creed
5 min read

Santa Claus and how not to give gifts

John Barclay unpacks the nature of gift-giving and finds Santa’s list is moralising in comparison to an older unconditional way.

John Barclay is Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University. He researches the history and thought of early Christianity and early Judaism. 

A Santa tiptoes in a darkened room carrying a lamp and holding up a finger in a gesture of silencing
Anderson W Rangel on Unsplash.

Christianity is a religion centered on the notion of gift.  It is no accident that Christmas, linked with what Christians consider the ultimate gift - the birth of Jesus, is a festival of gift-giving.  All sorts of historical and cultural traditions have accumulated around this festival, for good and ill, but one, it seems to me, has become especially problematic: the myth of Santa Claus.  The form of giving we associate with Santa Claus is the very opposite of what counts, in the Christian tradition, as a good gift. Here’s how. 

In the English-speaking world, Santa Claus (originally St Nicholas) is the man in the red coat and white beard to whom children address their requests for presents.  For many, he becomes a bit like God, and as such, shapes their image of God as normally absent, occasionally useful, and generally benign.  But if Santa is the distributor of gifts at Christmas, two things mark his giving: first, he gives according to merit; second, his giving is one-way and one-off, creating no relationship of trust, love, or obligation.   

The famous Santa song is better known in North America than in the UK, but it has lasted long in the popular imagination. It has also shaped our ideas of gift-giving.  Santa, you will recall, has a list of who’s been ‘naughty or nice’, and is using that list to direct his gifts. He is all-seeing and all-knowing (‘he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake’), so his merit-judgments are unfailingly correct: he ‘knows if you’ve been bad or good’ – so ‘be good for goodness sake’!  Santa’s gifts, in other words, are merited and conditioned.  At one level, this is an adult ploy to get children to behave at Christmas.  But at another, it reflects a remorselessly moralizing society, quick to judge who is deserving of praise or blame.   

As Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in The Tyranny of Merit, we have allowed the notion of ‘merit’ to govern so many aspects of our society that those who miss out on social and economic success are led to believe that it is really their fault. Santa is the projection of our sense that nothing good comes our way unless we somehow deserve it. 

The other feature of Santa’s giving is that it is all over in a trice: it creates no relationship and establishes no long-term connection.  The children who write letters asking for presents are not encouraged to enquire after Santa’s wellbeing during the rest of the year.  There is no friendship, no commitment, just one-way gifts that arrive without reciprocity or interpersonal depth.  That fits Western individualism, where we dislike the constraints created by long-term relationships. We will take a gift ‘with no strings attached’ because thereby we retain our autonomy, our power to choose, our independence.   

This was a gift ‘with strings attached’ – not unwelcome new obligations that forced them to do what they hated, but strings of love that enabled them to be better and fuller versions of themselves. 

he Christmas event was originally understood as a gift of a very different kind – in fact the inverse of the Santa-gift.  What the early Christians celebrated about the gift of Jesus was that it was completely unconditioned: it was given without regard to merit or desert.  Even in ancient times that was an unusual, even a bizarre, form of gift: surely it would make better sense to give to those who were worthy of the gift?  But what the Gospel writers and St Paul celebrated was that the gift took effect in unexpected, undeserving places – with uneducated fishermen, with women as much as men, with non-Jews as well as Jews, with the social underdogs and the morally dubious.   

This was a gift that had nothing to do with merit: it was given irrespective of worth and in the absence of worth.  Paul the persecutor received this gift; so did Mary, a village teenager; so did Peter, who let Jesus down time after time; so did idolatrous non-Jews; so did Zacchaeus (a tax-collector – about as popular as a loan shark today)).  This was not because the gift was given randomly. It was a strategic policy to make the gift available to all.  As an unconditioned gift, not dependent on gender, cultural background, social level, or moral achievement, the gift of the ‘good news’ belonged to no-one – and could go to everyone.  

As a result, the early Christians formed new kinds of communities that crossed most social boundaries, and excluded no one on the basis that they were not good enough to join.   

And was this a ‘Santa gift’ in the sense of creating no relationship, no ties, no expectations?  Far from it!  The gift of Christ was understood to transform those who received it, because ultimately it was the gift not of a thing but of a person.  Where Santa disappears for eleven months of the year, the Christians found that Jesus stuck around, not as a threat but as a transformative presence (in the form of ‘the Spirit’), who slowly, subtly, but definitively made them different than what they were before.  This was a gift ‘with strings attached’ – not unwelcome new obligations that forced them to do what they hated, but strings of love that enabled them to be better and fuller versions of themselves.  The Christ-gift drew its recipients, as theologians would later say, into the life of God, which is the best imaginable place for humans to be. 

So, how might you give gifts differently this Christmas?  Well, you could go beyond ‘the usual suspects’ and include some you would not normally include on your giving-list; why not reach out, with some gesture of goodwill, to someone with whom you have had a difficult relationship this year?  You could try to make your gifts more personal, as a token of who you are and who they are, and you could make an effort to continue the friendship beyond the ‘once a year’ gesture.  And if someone gives to you and you haven’t thought to give to them - a common source of embarrassment - no problem: take it as an invitation to friendship, to which you can always respond at some other time and in some other way.  There is always an opportunity for change and growth. 

An unconditioned gift that changes who you are - liberating and transformative, underserved and perpetually effective.  There might be reasons why we prefer the ‘no commitment’ gifts of Santa Claus, but we also know that the most meaningful gifts are personal; they create or sustain ties of friendship; even if they are things, they represent an interpersonal commitment of love.  Christmas is always a mixed blessing, but it is not helped by the Santa songs (or, indeed, by some terrible lines in Christmas carols!).  But at its origin it carries the tune of a different kind of gift, which takes no account of desert but changes its recipients in ways they can never forget. 

Review
Art
Character
Creed
Easter
Suffering
5 min read

Why sculpt the face of Christ?

In Nic Fiddian Green’s work we feel pain, strength, fear and wisdom.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A man looks up a shaft of light that illuminates him and a crucifix higher up a wall.
I Accepted, 2025.
Richard Foster.

The seeds of faith were sown in the life of Nic Fiddian Green by his father. As he has explained recently, he “was shown a way and a faith, and an understanding around the faith of Christianity, in the way my father lived”. 

Later, his wife-to-be, Henrietta Hutley, asked him to help create Stations of the Cross for the Wintershall Estate in Surrey where, today, The Nativity and the Life of Christ are regularly performed. Henrietta’s father, Peter, wrote and brought The Passion of Jesus to Trafalgar Square, while her mother, Anne, had the vision for the Stations of the Cross project after a life-changing visit to Medjugorje. 

Fiddian Green says that “The Face of Christ has been with me for over 40 years” and that he has “searched for His face through my art as part of my spiritual journey, and also in the work of many others – especially Renaissance artists like Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Michelangelo”. 

Fiddian Green, who is internationally celebrated for his monumental equine sculptures, has created a deeply personal and spiritually resonant exhibition entitled The Face of Christ. The exhibition features 20 new sculptures including works in bronze, copper, lead, marble, plaster, and silver, together with a series of drawings. The exhibition ranges from the Nativity to the Resurrection but focuses primarily on the crucifixion.  

The exhibition is deeply personal for Fiddian Green because it is informed by the harrowing encounters he had with an array of life-threatening illnesses a few years ago. These caused an obvious and honest creative re-assessment and it is from these experiences that a stronger, deeper and more contemplative vision has emerged. One that permeates the new work via modes of stillness and reflection.  

The Face of Christ offers a profoundly meditative engagement with the image of Christ, capturing a sense of serenity, resilience, and transcendence in bronze and stone. In these works, he shows us how his spirit and his faith help him triumph over the physical as he explores the enduring power of faith, suffering and redemption. In the eyes of his work, we feel pain, strength, fear, wisdom and more as he asks questions of the viewer that leave a powerful and spiritual resonance. 

Fiddian Green says: “These works are a reflection of my journey of faith. I have come to find that His power to elevate us underpins everything I strive to do and The Face of Christ is an attempt for me to convey in my work all that He conveys in my heart. Christ gives me the key, but will I open the door…?” 

While the exhibition focuses on the crucifixion and the face of the crucified Christ, the expression on Christ’s face is generally one of peace, rather than pain. In part, this is because many of the heads of Christ included are images of Christ resting in death prior to the resurrection. The brokenness that the crucifixion brought is shown in these images through damage to the body of Christ, as opposed to the expressions on his face. This is most powerfully the case with ‘Broken for You’, a bronze crucifixion sculpture where Christ’s torso, as well as being scarred by a long spear-like fissure, has also been fractured with the two parts fused together using brace brackets. Similar fissures appear on other of the crucifixion sculptures but ‘Broken for You’ goes furthest in graphically showing the pain Christ endured on our behalf. 

It seems to me that Fiddian Green could go further in revealing the horrors that Christ endured and that his love of Renaissance art with its focus on beauty and balance might hold him back in this regard. Another artist to have regularly depicted the Crucifixion in images shown in mainstream galleries in recent years is Peter Howson, whose images of the crucifixion are much more expressionist graphically capturing the depth of pain that Christ endured. Fiddian Green’s drawings, more than his sculptures, tap into the sense of pain endured, particularly ‘This Storm will Pass’, a partial image of the face of the crucified Christ which in its frenetic pencil-marks and incomplete state speaks particularly powerfully. 

Fiddian Green, by contrast, primarily gives us a sense of the peace that he receives from Christ on the face of Christ. ‘I Forgive’, a bronze head of the crucified Christ depicts the love with which Christ looks on us as he endures the cross. ‘Christ is Laid to Rest’ is a huge head encircled by a crown of massive spikey thorns with green verdigris overtones suggesting the sweat and blood of anguish which has led to the completion of purpose that Christ finds in death. ‘Peace’, a plaster sculpture of Christ’s head, is also redolent of the supreme achievement of the cross; ‘It is finished’, meaning that all his work is complete and done, enabling him to rest and enabling us to enter rest.  

In these images, Fiddian Green is reading back into the events of the crucifixion the outcomes that it gains for us and showing, in his Christ figures, the peace that he personally finds in the love and forgiveness which overflows from the crucified Christ to each and every human being throughout time and history.  

Fiddian Green writes of having “been given materials to use by the God of heaven and earth” – those materials of the earth that he uses in his sculptures – and says that “it is my hope that some of these pieces may rest and resonate with those who see it; that they may find a deep connection by gazing on the works which takes the eye, the heart and the soul to the One who helped me create them”.  

While Lent, Holy Week and Easter are often times when art is offered to enable us to walk in the footsteps of Christ it is not common for commercial galleries to specifically invite meditation on these events, so don’t miss the opportunity for contemplation that the Sladmore Gallery is providing through this exhibition. 

 

The Face of Christ, 10th April – 2nd May 2025, Sladmore Gallery, London.