When I was a small boy, I was a little confused about December 25th. I knew it was the birthday of Baby Jesus, and because he got presents, I got presents too, even though my birthday was in September. I thought it was very nice of Baby Jesus to make Santa Claus give me presents on His birthday.
I’d heard of God, of course: my parents started taking me to church on Sunday as soon as I could walk. I liked the organ music and the hymns the choir sang, but the gospel readings and the sermons bored me, so I squirmed and fidgeted, and my mother had to keep whispering to me to sit still. She had a very angry whisper, and sometimes it scared me and made me cry, so she’d have to take me out to the vestibule so my blubbering wouldn’t disturb the rest of the congregation. Missing the service made her miserable. She wasn’t particularly devout, but by the time I was seven or eight, her marriage to my father was beginning to go sideways, and church was a comfort to her. When I acted up, she lost that comfort, and she would punish me for the loss by sending me to bed as soon as I finished my supper, so I couldn’t watch The Mickey Mouse Club or The Lone Ranger on tv. On one occasion, I told her to go to hell, an expression I’d heard my Dad use when he fought with her. She spanked me with the flat side of her hairbrush, and I was more shocked than hurt. I didn‘t even cry. I just stared at her incredulously – and she burst into tears. She never spanked me again, not even with her hand.
I knew the “Our Father” prayer from church, but it puzzled me. My father and the father of my brother Mike certainly was not in Heaven yet: he was very much alive. Almost every night after I’d gone to bed, I could hear him from my second floor room fighting loudly with our mother about things that I didn’t understand.
Something else I didn’t understand was the parentage of Baby Jesus. Mary was His mother, but in some Bible stories, Joseph was His father, and He had a brother named James. But in others, something called the holy spirit was his father, and I didn’t know how a spirit and a woman could make a baby. It sounded weird and a little scary, more like a Halloween tale than a Christmas story. And what did any of that have to do with Christmas presents?
I was on solider ground with Santa Claus. He was definitely real, because my mother left a plate of cookies and a glass of milk for him near the fireplace on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Morning the plate and the glass were empty. There were small presents in my brother’s and my stockings, and larger ones under the Christmas tree. Mum and Dad provided our birthday presents, but Santa was in charge of Christmas gifts.
So as I lay in bed on a Christmas Eve when I was eight, trying to stay awake long enough to hear the jingle of sleighbells and the sound of reindeer hooves and Saint Nick’s boots on the roof, I puzzled out the mystery of Baby Jesus’s origin. He was the son of Santa and Mrs. Claus, whose first name was Mary. And I included all three of them in my prayers that night, along with my parents, my grandparents, my brother, some unknown soldier, and our dog Tina.
“Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soldier keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soldier take.
God bless Mummy and Daddy, Grandma Ellie and Grandpa Tommy, Grandmère and Bob, Mike and Tina, Santa and Mary Claus, and their little boy Jesus.”
That seemed to cover everyone, so I said “Amen.”