Jesus really cared a lot about kids. He picked up a little tyke and said, “You have to become like a little kid to enter the kingdom of heaven.” We must rely on others, especially our Heavenly Father.

He gave dire warnings to people that would make problems for kids, that would hurt kids. In one case he said, “It would b better that the person who had hurt the kid had been drowned with a millstone around his neck. 

Really. Really protective of children.  With a warning that we should take to heart. I am especially concerned about what happens at Christmas time and how children can be led astray. And be so disillusioned, and so hurt, that they no longer believe what an adult tells them.

I remember being about 9 years old. The kids at school were telling me, “There isn’t any Santa Claus.” And I was about ready to believe them when my Mother, during the middle of the night, woke me up, “Evelyn, Evelyn! Come Quick! Santa just went out to his reindeer“ And I dashed downstairs to look out the front window. There was no reindeer. There was no tracks. There was nothing. And I was so angry, so hurt. My mother would lie to me. Make a fool of me.

My oldest daughter, about the same age, had been told by kids at school, “There isn’t any Santa Claus.” She hadn’t heard and I hadn’t heard the beautiful rendition  that a member of our church was giving the children, telling them about how the stories of St. Nicholas began with a Bishop who used his own personal money to help kids at Christmas time. And other  people in general, but especially at Christmas, and how that became, after he died, a tradition in their community and eventually spread over the whole world.

A modern Santa Claus that we see and the stories we hear about Santa Claus have nothing to do with the original St. Nicholas. And they tend to obscure stories about Jesus birth and make children wonder, “Ah, if there is no Santa Claus, there’s nothing to that story about Jesus birth.” But there is something true about Jesus birth. Really true.