Christmas is our most important holiday, and its literature is correspondingly rich. Yet until now no adequate bundle of Christmas treasures in poetry and prose has found its way onto the Internet for Winter, Christmas, the birth of Christ, Santa Claus, and so much more..There is no Santa Claus - a Clergyman’s Blunder
There came to my desk this week a letter from an Anglican clergyman who is now practicing the high calling in one of the more notable churches in eastern Quebec. The contents of the letter itself would be of slight interest here. Suffice it to say that the reverend gentleman had beer; delving into some local history and was querying us as to whether or not it might make an acceptable news story.
I am quite sure that the pastor doesn’t have any idea who I am, but to me, his name was one which I recognized instantly even though it is now nearly 25 years since I have seen him.
The incident which impressed him so firmly upon my memory took place when I was a boy in knee pants in a small town where this good man had just taken over a pulpit in our proud little Anglican church. He was young and full of Godly ambition. The congregation was staid and had been satisfied for a long, long time. The zeal of their new pastor was just a little hard for them to take to their cautious hearts.
The more tolerant of the parishioners reminded the others that he was young and that time cures nearly everything.
Then came the Christmas concert. The minister had worked a long time on the homegrown talent at his disposal and by adding his own acting genius here and there, he had rounded out a program which even the more cynical of his flock admitted to be good.
The more tolerant gave him an even greater credit. It was the best Anglican program they could ever remember, they said. It was almost as good as the program the Latter Day Saints put on.
(Whether they had just been born dramatic or whether theirs was an inspiration which came from on High the Latter Day Saints were always credited with having the best Christmas concert in town.)
But then just as the program was coming to its splendid conclusion and the pastor’s star was rising to a new height, he committed the tragic blunder which was to make him so vividly remembered through all the years after. When he came out in front of the curtains to make the little closing speech expected of pastors on such occasions, he admitted that there was no Santa Claus.
The pronouncement was not the burden of his speech, of course. It was something which came rather incidentally, and he hastily added the customary compensating talk about the spirit of Santa Claus which was indeed real and which was far more important than the little red fat man himself.
But the damage had been done. The church basement was filled to the furnace with youngsters of all ages that night, and they had all heard. The silence which took hold of their parents Was the silence of utter darkness.
“How could he?” someone near me whispered. “How could he be such a fool?”
And for years afterward, that moment of supreme honesty was the one thing which was always recalled whenever it became necessary to prove the young man incompetent or unworthy of continuing in their pulpit.
But the strangest fact of all, and the fact which I remember just as clearly as the great pronouncement itself, was that it was the parents who were so rudely shocked that night. There wasn’t a whimper from a child anywhere. I doubt if they were even surprised. And when in full Santa regalia, the village mayor trooped and whooped onto the stage a few minutes later their screams of delight were just as loud as those which had ever greeted any Santa, real or revealed, any time, anywhere.
