Who could possibly have arranged a celebration that encourages your kids to direct their petitions to Santa instead of to God? Call the Santa hotline, write Santa a letter? Put out food and drink offerings for him?
From: biblefriendlybooks.com
Who Invented Santa?
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Should Santa be avoided by Christians?
One meme that floats around the internet claims that ‘Santa’ is simply an anagram for ‘Satan.’ I used to think that was a stretch… just because ‘santa’ and ‘satan’ have the same letters, that’s a coincidence, isn’t it? That’s as weird as twisting ‘St. Nick’ into ‘Old Nick’ – British slang for Satan. (Remember the movie Little Nicky about Satan’s son?) Can’t be a connection, can there?
Now, I’m not so sure. “Santa” is an American word. It seems to have been made up by Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote the poem we know as ‘The night before Christmas’ in the early 1800s. He made up ‘Santa Claus’ out of the Dutch ‘sinterklaas’ – Saint Nicholas. New York at that time, aka New Amsterdam, still had a significant Dutch population during his life.
But how did Moore arrive at ‘Santa’? Moore was an American professor of Oriental and Greek Literature, as well as Divinity and Biblical Learning, at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in New York City. … He simply made up a word, drawing from the Dutch idea and the sound of “Sinterklaas.”
But what was the Dutch idea of Sinterklaas?
They celebrated Saint Nicholas’ day on December 6. That celebration had nothing to do with Christmas. Nicholas had a sidekick, a horned, hairy goat-shaped character called Krampus. In other parts of Europe he was called ‘Black Pete.’ Children were told they would be judged by the pair. If they were good, Nicholas would give them coins or candy. If they were judged as naughty, Krampus or Black Pete would beat them with a bundle of birch switches. If they were really bad, Krampus would throw them in his bag and take them back to hell. That’s right: Krampus was a demon. (Pete was simply a moor – an African Muslim. His threat was to take kids back to Africa.)
What was Moore thinking, calling Santa a ‘jolly old elf’? …
But even the Sinterklaas legend isn’t really based on the quasi-true stories of the perhaps real Nicholas of Myra. Long before Christianity began to be preached in Northern Europe the people there worshipped Odin or Woden. (If you think you’ve never heard of him, Wednesday started out as Woden’s Day.) Guess how Odin was depicted? Long white beard, red cape, flying horse, delivering gifts to nice children in December.
If someone asked you to worship Baal, Molech or one of the other pagan gods listed in the Bible, no doubt you would refuse, right? And you would never worship Satan, would you?
If Satan took one of the old pagan gods you rejected, dressed him up in a red suit, white beard, big smile, twinkly eyes – are you still going to reject him?
Who could possibly have arranged a celebration that encourages your kids to direct their petitions to Santa instead of to God? Call the Santa hotline, write Santa a letter? Put out food and drink offerings for him?
Could it be, possibly, in the words of the Church Lady, “SATAN?”
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