LDS Freedom Forum

Jesus never established Christmas, the entire thing was conceived out of the minds of pagans in the dark ages. But we celebrate it as a cultural tradition along with the metaphors, symbols and types. We find the good in it and celebrate with everyone else. If you want to pick and choose the traditional elements that you want to incorporate into your traditions you are free to do so; in fact, most people do.

5tev3 wrote:Straw man - bad form.

5tev3 wrote:A pure worship would not have Christmas at all which isn't a true, pure holy day to begin with.

Rob wrote:

5tev3 wrote:Straw man - bad form.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... you go issue a cryptic statement like that and cry foul when asked to clarify, but that's not bad form though, is it, Steve?

buffalo_girl wrote:

Jesus never established Christmas, the entire thing was conceived out of the minds of pagans in the dark ages. But we celebrate it as a cultural tradition along with the metaphors, symbols and types. We find the good in it and celebrate with everyone else. If you want to pick and choose the traditional elements that you want to incorporate into your traditions you are free to do so; in fact, most people do.

Jesus wasn't born December 25. He was born in the Spring of the year when shepherds were overseeing their ewes giving birth. It was 'lambing' time. I thought we assigned April 6 as the true date of the Savior's birth.

My understanding is that the 'gift giving' tradition originated after St. Nicholas' death December 6, 343 AD in honor of his life of 'giving gifts' when he served as a Bishop.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Nngtuj ... &q&f=false

Teaching Your Children the Truth About Santa Claus

by Steve Benson

....Traditions of Mormon Hearth and Ho-Ho-Home

Like many of you, growing up, our family enjoyed favorite Christmas traditions, especially ones geared toward the children.

By far, the most anticipated event was the arrival of Santa Claus at the Benson house on Christmas Eve. Milk and cookies were set out for St. Nick, along with carrots for the reindeer. (The next morning, the children would find the food all gone with a thank-you note left behind by a contented Santa).

The highlight of Christmas Eve was when the children gathered around the family piano, as Mom played and Dad led us in an enthusiastic rendition of “Jingle Bells.” It was our signal for Santa to make his presence known in the neighborhood.. As the children reached the chorus, suddenly Santa’s sleigh bells would be heard ringing around the perimeter of the house, accompanied by a deep, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” The children would scream and rush off to bed, where they would dive under the covers and squeeze their eyes tightly shut, knowing that Santa would not come by the home of good little boys and girls until they were all sound asleep.

But getting to slumberland often proved difficult for the children. The conniving [ ] grown-ups made it all the more challenging for them with more delightful deceptions. Out in the dark backyard, a flashlight covered in a red sock could be seen bounding across the lawn. “Look!” the adults would cry, pointing out to the children, “It’s Rudolph’s nose!”

These traditions were passed from generation to generation in our household. As the Benson children grew older and came to know the real “truth” about Santa, they, too, were brought into the secret fraternity [ ] and would participate in the elaborate ruse geared for their younger siblings who still believed. Those “in the know” would ring the bells outside the house and then sneak back inside to help shepherd the anxious little ones off to bed.

As part of the antics myself, I would dress up in a Santa suit and climb up on our roof, where my younger siblings could hear me clomping around and shouting, “On Dasher! On Dancer! On Prancer and Vixen!” One year, I nearly fell off.

Another year, the holiday hoaxing came close to being embarrassingly exposed. At the time, our family was living in the mission home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where my dad was serving as president.

The home had a large garage connected to the main living quarters by an outdoor walkway. Over the garage was a small apartment for the mission home staff.

On Christmas Eve, I was decked out in my Santa suit, holding a large garbage bag over my shoulder filled with pillows and standing on the walkway, giving my best belly laugh performance.

Peering out of the window across the way was my wide-eyed little brother, Mike. As I strutted around, bellowing and waving, the door of the mission home staff’s apartment opened behind me. The staff hadn’t been informed beforehand about the planned Santa act. Before I could say, “Dash away all!” one of the missionaries grabbed me, yelled, “Get in here, you honker!,” then jerked me inside. I struggled to break free, frantically telling them they were ruining the whole thing.

Mike later asked why the missionaries pulled Santa inside and slammed the door. I told him Santa wanted to meet with them.

Miracle of miracles, Mike still faithfully believed.

Our hokey, hallowed Santa tradition continued, as Mary Ann and I raised our own children.

After the Christmas caroling around the piano, the bell-ringing and the scampering off to bed, I would wait until the wee hours of Christmas morning, then don the red suit, strap on the beard, adjust the cap and visit the bedrooms of each our slumbering children. There, I would pat them on the head, whisper their names until they woke up, give them a candy cane and ask them what they wanted for Christmas. All the while, Mary Ann would be taking photographs of the grumpy, bleary-eyed children who, at that point in the middle of the night, wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep.


Personal Childhood Trauma: [ ] The Santa Myth Unmasked and Unbearded

As fun as it was for me as a Santa-believing child anticipating the arrival of the jolly old gift giver, finding out that St. Nick was nothing but a myth (a polite term for bald-faced lie) was a seriously disappointing—and sobering—experience.

Perhaps it raises a more important question: How beneficial is it to children to push the Santa Claus fable on them in the first place?

For years, I was one of Santa’s true believers. I “knew” he was real, lived at the North Pole, had many elves who made toys in his workshop, kept track of all the good and bad boys and girls, and flew through the air circumventing the globe on Christmas Eve, pulled by magic reindeer, to deliver toys or coal to all the deserving recipients.

I knew this was true because my parents told me it was.

And parents don’t lie.

Trouble was, I had a next-door neighbor friend named Clark, who claimed to know otherwise.

One day he informed me that Santa Claus was a fake. With vivid memories of my family’s Christmas Eve antics dancing through my head, I absolutely refused to believe him.

“Feel his beard when you sit on his lap,” Clark advised me. “It’s fake.”

So, when we visited Santa that year at the department store, I waited anxiously in line for my turn, dreading what I might discover. Sitting on Santa’s knee, I was hardly listening to him as he asked me what I wanted for Christmas, concentrating instead on gingerly twisting a bit of his beard between my fingers. But having never felt a beard before, I couldn’t tell whether or not it was real and returned home, troubled and unsure.

From there, the cold icicles of doubt began to creep into my mind: Was Santa really real? I wanted so much to believe, but my eyes were, well, beginning to be opened.

One Christmas morning in Salt Lake City, as we were unwrapping our presents around the tree, I noticed something rather perplexing about the big box in which my much-anticipated dinosaur set had come.

It sported a retail price tag from Skaggs department store. I asked my dad why this was so.

“Aren’t the toys made in Santa’s workshop?”

He replied, “They are, but then Santa’s elves take them to the stores.”

My eyes were beginning to open even wider.

The final, devastating moment of truth came during my eighth year. By believer’s standards, I was old. Most of my friends no longer bought the Santa story, but I had struggled desperately to hold on, wanting to believe that all I had heard and seen through my life really was true.

One day, I was walking through the kitchen and spotted a small paperback book on the kitchen table. It had a picture of a boy and girl on the cover, running and smiling. Authored by Frances L. Ilg and Louse Bates Ames, it was entitled The Gesell Institute’s Child Behavior: A realistic guide to child behavior in the vital formative years from birth to ten (New York, New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1955).

I have saved that fragile and tattered book as part of my childhood collection of artifacts chronicling my journey through this veil of tears. What its now-yellowed pages revealed to me that fateful day was to prove to be of some importance in the formation of my skeptical attitude toward authoritative claims made by others.

As a child, I liked to read, so I went to my room with the book and opened it to the table of contents. There, under Chapter 17, in capital letters, were the words: “WHAT TO TELL ABOUT SANTA CLAUS, DEITY, DEATH, ADOPTION, DIVORCE,” p. 323.

Nervously, I opened to page 323 and under the sub-heading “Santa Claus,” scanned the words I had feared:

”There really isn’t a Santa Claus, is there, Mummy?” Six-year-old Peter regarded his mother searchingly.

Mother hesitated for a moment. She had known that this day would come--but still--questions about Santa, like questions about sex, often pop up when we’re not quite prepared for them. She decided to tell the truth.

“No, Peter, there really isn’t any Santa Claus.”

I closed the book, as a twinge of anxiety and sense of betrayal hit my stomach.

Now, I knew I had to ask the same question.

So, I returned to the kitchen, where my own mother was preparing a meal.

“Mommy,” I asked, “Is there a Santa Claus?”

“Yes,” she replied.

But recalling what I had just read on page 323 and unable to suppress my own doubts any longer, I persisted: “I mean the big fat man with the beard.”

My mom hesitated, then, without looking directly at me, said, “No. Daddy is Santa Claus.”

With emotions of disappointment mingled with a triumphal sense of “ah-ha!,” I replied:

“I know. I read it in a book.”

That day, at the ripe old age of eight, I learned a vital lesson:

You can’t trust adults to tell you the truth.

As I look back on that experience, I realize that losing faith in both “the big fat man with the beard” and in adults who vouched for his existence played a pivotal role in the development in my own mind of a certain degree of skepticism and distrust of authority figures--ranging from Mormon prophets, to parents, to God himself.

Memories from the childhood of 5tev3:

I remember growing up in a loving and caring LDS household - or so I thought. I remember how my innocent childhood curiosity would prompt me to ask "Where do babies come from, Mommy?" as I was the oldest and saw new siblings come into the world. I was told all kinds of fantastic stories about the baby being in the 'belly' and how it came to be there. As I became older, I learned from my wise friends in school the horrific and disgusting truth about how babies were really "made". My friend told me that only food is in the tummy and that babies could not survive the acidic environment and that Moms had ANOTHER secret tummy where babies grow! I felt like I had been betrayed by those who loved me most and vowed that I would NEVER have children and follow after their lying and deceitful ways.

I soon realized that if my parents could lie to me about something as important as life itself, then everything else that they said must be a LIE! So I've stopped brushing my teeth, I make faces at people as often as I feel like it. When I go jogging, I go in the street with my shoes untied and with a fistful of scissors in each hand. I put my chair as close to the TV as possible and only eat dessert and I drive by my siblings homes to tease them as often as I can. I am no longer invited to any family activities, but good riddance to all those LIARS!

ChemtrailWatcher wrote:

Memories from the childhood of 5tev3:

I remember growing up in a loving and caring LDS household - or so I thought. I remember how my innocent childhood curiosity would prompt me to ask "Where do babies come from, Mommy?" as I was the oldest and saw new siblings come into the world. I was told all kinds of fantastic stories about the baby being in the 'belly' and how it came to be there. As I became older, I learned from my wise friends in school the horrific and disgusting truth about how babies were really "made". My friend told me that only food is in the tummy and that babies could not survive the acidic environment and that Moms had ANOTHER secret tummy where babies grow! I felt like I had been betrayed by those who loved me most and vowed that I would NEVER have children and follow after their lying and deceitful ways.

I soon realized that if my parents could lie to me about something as important as life itself, then everything else that they said must be a LIE! So I've stopped brushing my teeth, I make faces at people as often as I feel like it. When I go jogging, I go in the street with my shoes untied and with a fistful of scissors in each hand. I put my chair as close to the TV as possible and only eat dessert and I drive by my siblings homes to tease them as often as I can. I am no longer invited to any family activities, but good riddance to all those LIARS!

The various tribes who settled in England all preserved pedigrees deducing their rulers from this same Odin. These pedigrees kept independently by the different tribes form the best evidence that he actually lived and reigned in the north ... (The Children of Ephraim” in The Utah Genealogical Magazine. Volume XXI, 1930, page 80)

From the time each of the children is able to talk and understand, we tell them the truth about Santa Claus. We tell them: St. Nicholas, Archbishop of Myra, Turkey, in the fourth century, was the patron saint of sailors, pawnbrokers and children, and traveled about giving to the poor. His legend drifted north and merged with the myth of the god Odin, another wanderer, who drove reindeer and judged the deeds of men. So, today St. Nick – the Dutch called him “Sinterklaas” – is said to check up on children and bring them presents in a sleigh. (T. F. James. “The Wonders of Christmas,” This Week. 20 Dec. 1964, p. 4.)

Darren, I don't do this enough!

Thank you for your very insightful explanations, all "myths" have a beginning, and oft times, that beginning is a righteous beginning, turned bad by the unlearned.

Thanks Darren, I love your posts.

Bob

JulesGP wrote:Maybe I missed it but did anyone actually call names and condemn anyone to hell over their choice to celebrate Christmas with Santa? I know I personally felt bad for lying to my son and having to "break the truth" to him, and I chose to not make a big deal about Santa and teach about him to my younger son, and told my kids we'll respect other's belief in Santa and not ruin it for them. I also backed up my reasons with my feelings and why I chose to celebrate this way. I feel good about the way I am doing things in my home. This is similar to what I saw others post who share my beliefs on this issue. If I sounded arrogant about it, that was not my intention. This is simply what we do in our home.

So like I said, did someone actually call names and condemn, or are a lot of people getting defensive over Santa when nobody is actually attacking them? Because I thought we were just having a discussion and telling each other our feelings on the issue, but it seems like everyone is so passionate about this issue - as if we were discussing whether or not the BOM is true with a room full of Mormons and Athiests! It also seems like a lot of the people who choose to celebrate with Santa are the ones doing the mocking and belittling, and acting as if those of us who do not incorporate Santa in our Christmas celebration, are being "self-righteous" for believing that way, or are ruining our kids for NOT having a Santa Christmas.

I am really sad to see that kind of attitude, especially on this forum. We obviously all have different reasons for the way we choose to celebrate Christmas. The church has no official position on Santa to settle the matter. I don't think anyone is going to hell for having Santa as one of their traditions. I also know that we won't have Santa and stockings and Christmas trees in the Celestial Kingdom - just like we won't have music many of us listen to, movies we watch, Facebook, BYU Football, etc.... and we'll have to let go of those traditions and vices at some point too. But maybe we could just share our ideas and beliefs about the subject without mocking and belittling each other. My gosh, the spirit of this thread certainly isn't keeping with the spirit of Christmas the Lord would want us to have - with OR without Santa.

" If you don't want to use him in your tradition, then that is fine, but don't go around accusing the rest of us as being liars."

If we are to worship the LORD then we have to stop worshiping idols. Santa does nothing but take the focus of Christmas away from Jesus and one to an idol. Another problem with Santa is that many parents are teaching children to believe in something that is a LIE! Santa is a lie make no mistake about it. Those of you who perpetuate the idea of a Santa one night in then the very next night you tell them about another mythical creature called Jesus. This confuses children.

OH SANTA is harmless.... oh really... so is just a little sin... it is harmless... eat, brink, be merry for tomorrow we die. hmmm

Santa should not be in any Christian home or church celebration.

Telling a child a lie like believing in Santa is not being Christ-like.

NONE of those things involve Satan...ooops I mean Santa

A pure worship of Christmas would not include Santa Clause.

ChemtrailWatcher wrote:Unfortunately, I can see that there have been a fair number of "crusaders" on this thread. Post #2 was just the beginning.