When I was in grade school, a priest in my parish told me Santa wasn’t real.
Although it was by and large one of the lesser traumas a Catholic priest has caused a child, it stands as one of my more awful moments.
I went to public school until college, so I took religion classes once a week with dozens of other kids from grades first through eighth. While we were all waiting in the common room for our parents to pick us up after class, Father John grabbed a mic and fed us a lecture threaded with some good, old-fashioned Catholic guilt, starting with:
“Now, we all know Santa isn’t real, right?”
The middle-schoolers all nodded. The rest of us cried.
As he went on, he revealed his point — which was as Catholics, it’s our duty to resist the commercial side of Christmas. Year in and year out, we’re supposed to be so consumed with the birth of our Savior that we shouldn’t feel the need to send lengthy wish lists to the North Pole. We’re supposed to worry about God seeing our sins, not Santa seeing our naughty behavior.
After I made my confirmation in eighth grade, my family’s attendance at our parish began to thin out, and we started popping up in pews only on Christmas and Easter. As a kid, I was never exactly amused by the tedious Masses, so I was thrilled with my parents’ withdrawal. But they’d had reasons more compelling than boredom.
It was stuff like the Santa vs. God lecture my parents had tired of. Sermons basically outlined what we could do as Catholics and what we could not. The line between church and culture was constantly widening to the point where we felt forced to choose.
It wasn’t until college that I started attending Mass regularly. (It’s on campus. I have no excuse.) Now that I’m going for myself, and not just to obey my parents, it’s become a meaningful part of my routine.
Last Friday, my friends and I went to Lessons and Carols at Gesu to support our friends in the choir. As I skimmed the program beforehand, I realized the only songs I recognized were those that Mariah Carey covered on her 1994 Christmas album (such a classic): “O Holy Night,” “Silent Night” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.”
Yikes, I thought to myself. Is that bad?
I guess it depends whom you ask.
To me, there’s nothing wrong with celebrating Christmas — including the cheesiest, most commercial parts of it. The pop albums, the expensive wrapping paper, the endless batches of sugar cookies. They’re part of our culture, our traditions.
As kids, we should be allowed to believe in Heaven and the North Pole, in Santa Claus and God, and it should be OK if we think about one a little more than the other. I’ve realized there’s no way I could’ve had such a strong appreciation for my faith when I was eight. It’s taken years for that to happen. But it was bound to happen at a place like Marquette, so I wish my childish beliefs could’ve been suspended a little while longer.
Still, that’s all in the past. And while Christmas is all about nostalgia, the troubles are not what we remember.
Instead, we remember Christmas is a holiday — from work, from school, from routines, from negativity, from reality. It’s a time for us to listen to Delilah on Lite FM and drink beverages that have more calories than the meals they accompany. It’s a time for us to celebrate what we believe and who we love. It’s a time when guilt is omitted from the equation.
So no matter how many times you’ve been to church this year or how long ago you’ve stopped believing, don’t sit this one out. It’s called a holiday for a reason.