For students of history a fundamental law of the discipline seems to be that history is simply doomed to repeat itself.
As we’ve looked at Advent traditions throughout the previous posts we’ve gone through most of the disciplines, prayers, and celebrations we think of when we imagine Christmas and all its symbolism and practice. Trees, Wreaths, the Date/Calendar, and Saint Nicholas. When understood properly, these can be helpful additions to our faith and life, but more commonly, these are merely vestigial features of a dead faith. As the old English proverb goes: Where God would built a church the Devil builds a chapel (chapel is the English term for non-established, dissenting faiths, church always refers to a Church of England parish – the meaning being, where God authors orthodoxy, Satan creates heresy. The general truth of the proverb can also be admitted without accepting the placeholder / being Anglican).
In any case, during the Reformation, Martin Luther was disturbed by the false devotion the populas had towards St. Nicholas, which could be little more than baptized materialism. (Yes, even in the late Middle Ages, gift-giving was quite popular) Likewise, the celebration of St. Nicholas as the gift-giving saint – noble and true as that was – tended to obscure the real gift-giver of the season: Jesus. So Luther came up with the idea of the Christkindl – the Christ-child gift giver. Eventually this title was anglicized as the name: Kris Kringle. Santa Claus was thus originally in the German Tradition supposed to be an image of Christ who gives all of us salvation, when in the Dutch Tradition it was still St. Nicholas the giver of material gifts to children.
Well, sinful man proved his stripes once again, and guess which Tradition prospered in the English-speaking world: Santa as St. Nicholas. Humanity would always rather honor an idol, one of their own, giving material gifts that they actually want, to the Christ-child who gives us his righteousness and salvation which we esteem less desirable than a new iPod.
History after all, has a way of repeating itself.