Reasons To Do Without

I'm pretty adamant about not doing the whole Santa Claus thing with my kids. I have reasons, and they're justified in my mind. People who do the Santa thing are great and more power to them. Heck, my parents did it, though I'm going to go ahead and say it was pretty half-heartedly. I don't remember ever believing in the big guy, though I did have brunch with him once.

I'm inspired to write about this because of the Boston Big Picture story I just saw about the end of the Christmas Season. I always forget that for some people, Christmas doesn't end until those Magi show up. Maybe it shouldn't end at all... I mean He came and He's coming back right?

Click here and take a look at these pictures. They're fabulous! My favorites are the ones that say stuff like, "Palestinian Christians," or, "Iraqi Christians," because they are so encouraging. (#12 is also a shocker, a part of the "Santa" tradition I never knew!) But there's one picture that just sort of sums up why I feel the way I do.

Placed side by side like that sort of puts everything in a new light. I mean, legends say that St. Nicolas raised people from the dead and threw bags of gold into the windows of poor people in the dead of night.

And I'm determined to teach my kids by whose power he did all that, and that that "stuff" is for us, today.

(and that Santa isn't real!)