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

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.

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13 September 2024

7 min read

Living sustainably doesn’t have to be a burden, here’s the case for action

How not to get hot and bothered about climate change.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A protester holds up a green sign reading: 'It's hard to be green. Kermit'.

Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

The fundamental tenets of Christianity show why Christians are called to love not just one another but all created things.

1. God is love.

2. God created everything.

Therefore, God loves everything he created.

3. God appointed humanity as the guardians of creation.

Therefore, a fundamental part of our identity and calling as human beings is to protect and sustain all that God created.

This lies at the basis of everything Christians believe and do. But a case can be made that is more basic still because it appeals, not to anything distinctively Christian, but to natural human wisdom. The climate crisis is not a Christian crisis. It’s a crisis for everyone who cares about their future and that of our planet. The climate crisis may be something unprecedented in the history of humanity, but the principles that are needed to resolve it are not new at all. Sustainability is not a new or particularly abstruse idea. It is something everyone understands as basic common sense. If I cut down trees faster than they can grow, I won’t be able to do that forever. One day I will cut down the last tree and then there won’t be any more trees, ever again. If I catch fish faster than they can reproduce, then one day I will catch the last fish and then won’t be able to catch any more ever again.

But it’s not only about foresters and fishermen. Since the dawn of humanity, we have been living sustainably – wisely preserving resources and using only what we can replace, so that we and our descendants can continue to live. This applies to everyone regardless of their profession. All of us, if we spend more money than we earn, are living in a way that cannot last for long. If we use resources at a faster rate than we can replenish them, we will run into trouble at some point in the future. Every person possessed of reason and common sense knows this intuitively without having to be taught it. Only someone seriously deluded, foolish, or with some kind of mental health problem fails to understand the need for sustainability in order to have any kind of future at all, let alone a pleasant future.

The call to live sustainably can lead us to feel burdened by a permanent sense of guilt, a feeling that we ought to be doing more than we are...

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We are burning fossil fuels at hundreds of times the rate they can be produced. We are producing plastics that cannot be recycled, meaning we have to dump them in landfills that are growing all the time. We are pouring carbon dioxide into the air faster than anyone can take it out. All of these things mean that there is a time limit on the kind of lifestyles we are all leading now. If we carry on in this way, then one day we will cross a line from which there is no returning. As Mark Scarlata has pointed out, the solution cannot be technological. Even if we find a way to balance carbon outputs with inputs, we are only kicking the can further down the road. Our inability to live within our means will simply resurface somewhere else later on. The problem is spiritual, not technical.

Everyone understands this at some level even if it’s the kind of truth from which we prefer to avert our eyes. The harder problem is to understand why this basic common sense isn’t proving effective. Why are we living collectively in a way that only a foolish or insane person would live, when most of us taken by ourselves are neither foolish or insane?

The problem, at least in part, is that we are all entangled in systems that make it very hard for us to live sustainably. If I am an ordinary Brit living in an ordinary town or city, and I need to buy toothbrushes or nappies or cucumbers or strawberries, I go to the local supermarket: and the only options available are made of plastic or wrapped in plastic that will not decompose for 500 years, and often brought here from the other side of the world using huge amounts of carbon emissions. Most of us are busy people with limited financial resources. We don’t have the time to find sustainable alternatives and often they are too expensive even if we can find them. The societal structures that we live in limit the choices we have. The call to live sustainably can lead us to feel burdened by a permanent sense of guilt, a feeling that we ought to be doing more than we are, but also an inability to see how we could be doing more given all the pressures, needs and constraints on our time and money.

Christians do not naively believe that God will sweep in and fix everything if we just wait. That would be to deny our responsibility, and it is not what hope means.

We are all culprits in part, since we all contribute to non-sustainable living. But we are also partly victims of forces beyond our control, large cultural forces that shape and determine our actions more than we can imagine. We have very little power over those structural forces and currently things do not look good. Common sense principles aren’t working. The climate crisis is only getting worse. So, what do we do?

It is at this point that Christianity has something special to offer to the problem.

First, Christians are never called to be defeatist or to throw in the towel. This is because we are called to an enormous hope, a hope that surpasses understanding, a hope that the world cannot understand because it stands over against all the odds and all the possibilities. This hope is rooted in the conviction that our God is God Almighty, that he has not abandoned his creation, and that he has power to save. He is a saviour. He is the God of our salvation. This is the God we believe in. The climate crisis may look bleak right now, but Christians need never despair or become indifferent. If we do our small part, we can trust that God is in control of what is out of our control.

Secondly, Christians believe that every human being is a free agent with the capacity to choose how he or she will act. Our freedom may be limited by the societal structures that shape and constrain our choices, but it is not destroyed. We can still make choices within those limits to buy and live more sustainably – anything from choosing a holiday destination within driving distance, to giving up beef (by far the worst food for carbon emissions). There is something all of us can do.

Thirdly, Christians believe in a God who transforms hearts and lives, winning them to the power of the gospel and to a new way of living that is free of the shackles that this world – the structures of society – puts on us. This transformation is slow – slower than we would like it to be sometimes. We feel the shackles still gripping us at times. We are not expected to change everything all at once, to become holy overnight. Nevertheless, God gives us the power to change our lives, and to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The way towards sustainable living is not to try to change everything at once, but to ask: what one thing can I change in my daily lifestyle that would make it more sustainable? And then once we’ve mastered that and integrated it so we no longer even think about it and it’s just a default, then we can ask: what’s the next thing I can do? All of a sudden what looks like an unimaginable height of transformation, when it is broken down, becomes a series of manageable steps.

Even if we do everything in our power, we cannot by ourselves avert a possible catastrophe. We are small players in a big game. Christians do not naively believe that God will sweep in and fix everything if we just wait. That would be to deny our responsibility, and it is not what hope means. Hope means the opposite: that we continue to fight to avert climate disaster even when it seems hopeless. Christians are called to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. We are called to live in such a way that, if catastrophe comes, it won’t be because of us – to live in hope that our actions are meaningful and worthwhile and that we are in the hands of a God who is far more powerful than the most powerful forces in this world.