Why I Believe in Santa Claus

Today, my husband posted a “personalized” Santa Claus video on Facebook that we’d made and sent to our daughter.   One of his friends, a staunch atheist, made this comment on the thread: “I’m telling [my son] the truth about Santa, because I don’t want to tell him a lie, besides, if he starts believing cultural mythology, who knows what he might start believing.”

I felt his comment was kind of Grinchy so I fired off a less-than-patient reply — told him that he’d “missed the point.”  I immediately recognized that my comment was made in frustration — something I try to avoid, since the Internet is a mean enough place without me joining in — so I quickly deleted my response.   He must have seen it anyway, though, because when I logged in again tonight I noticed that he’d added another reply: “Katie, ‘you missed the point’ is an easy thing to say.  Please explain what the point is, then I’ll know.”

After some deliberation, I decided I’d answer his question (hopefully with a much gentler spirit than before).  This is what I wrote:

What Creation Tells Us About Ourselves and God

Been reading and thinking lately about the Creation.

The other week, my sister called and asked me, “Why did you have a daughter?”  And this launched a long discussion about the impulse to create.  I asked, “Why does a painter paint, or a writer write, or a builder build?”

We decided there’s something about the creating, the painting, the writing, the building, that is inherently valuable.  It’s about expressing life and expressing self.  And as God’s creations, we are expressions of Him — which is really a beautiful concept when you think about it.

Anyway, I jotted down some thoughts on the subject yesterday and thought I’d share them here.  They’re fairly disorganized, just a few scattered paragraphs, but I figured they might be worth exploring…