IV.
SANTA CLAUS
All little children are poets if not marred by the prosaic parent or teacher who unintentionally dulls the imaginative faculties by insisting upon their minds dwelling exclusively on facts which can be verified by the five senses.
Much innocent pleasure as well as much development of intellectual power is lost by this misapprehension of a child's needs. All great truth must come to the immature mind in an embodied form or by means of a symbol. In fact, we of more mature culture still cling to the sacred symbols of the church by means of which communion with the Divine and the regenerating power of the spirit of God are expressed. The spire of a church, the flag of our nation, the medal with which we decorate the breast of a hero, are but a few of the symbols with which we are all familiar. Indeed, if symbols were banished from our daily lives much of pleasure and beauty would be lost.
Again, when we insist upon mere facts being presented to our children we rob them of the great heirloom which has come down to them from the past in the form of those inexhaustible mythical stories by means of which the race has learned its most beautiful lessons of the true nobility and grandeur of life; stories so rich and full and significant that two or three thousand years have not dimmed their luster, nor lessened their power to hold and impress the childish mind.
As the Christmas season approaches many honest, earnest parents are perplexed as to what to do with the time-honored legend of Santa Claus. They do not realize that he is but the poetic embodiment of the Christian thought of great love manifesting itself through giving. The joyous loving nature of the innocent Santa Claus brings closer to the childish heart the realization of the willingness with which the Divine Father gave to his children – mankind. The traditional fireplace through which the beloved Santa Claus gains entrance into the house is but a symbol of that center of light and warmth and cheer which love lights in every true home. The mystery of the coming and going of this great-hearted lover of good little children is but the embodied way of expressing that mystery of love which makes labor light and sacrifice a pleasure. The whole legend of Santa Claus, when rightly understood, is but the necessarily crude – and therefore more easily grasped – foreshadowing of the sacred thought of God's infinite love which lies at the very center of the Christmas thought. No one can deplore more than we Kindergartners do the coarse and oftentimes grotesque representations of Santa Claus which are to be seen in many advertisements and shop windows at this season of the year.
Almost all children gradually outgrow the idea of Santa Claus as they do other childish conceptions after they have served their purpose of training the emotional nature in the right direction. The transition is the more easily made if the child is gradually led to make and to give Christmas gifts to those he loves. Thus, as I have tried to show in a previous article, the mere material thought of Christmas as a time for a jolly lot of fun is gradually changed into the higher thought of a joyful festival, through the child's own deeds.
No mother need expect her child to understand the Christian Christmas by one celebration. His own experiences of the joy which arises from unselfish giving must be repeated many times before he can enter into the thought that God, in whose image he has been made, must have shown his love to mankind by some such manifestation as that which the celebration of Christmas commemorates.
V.
CHRISTMAS TIME.2
A memory which will always remain with me comes up as I approach the end of these chronicles. And although it did not arise from any one picture or song of the "Mother-Play-Book," it was caused by the Kindergarten study which had become part of our inmost life.
The long, dry season was over. Half a dozen rains had refreshed the land and caused it to blossom like a garden. It was hard to realize, midst the roses and lilies, tender green foliage and fragrant orange-blossoms, rippling streams and songs of mocking-birds, that Christmas was approaching; our northern minds had always associated the season with sleigh-bells and ice and snow, and yet it was amidst just such semitropical surroundings as these, that in the faraway Palestine was born the Babe, the celebration of whose returning birthday each year fills all Christendom with the spirit of self-sacrifice, love, and joy, and binds, as does no other festal day, a multitude of the human race into one common brotherhood.
Margaret and I decided that whatever else we did or did not do, during the remainder of our sojourn among the hills, the children should have a real Christmas. In order that we might make it an inner Christmas as well as an outer one, we began at the approach of Advent to show them how to make Christmas presents. It took no small amount of patience to pin down to definite work, which must be neatly and daintily done, the two little mortals who had lived almost as free from tasks as the lilies of the field. However, we both realized that the children must make a real effort to give genuinely to others something which they themselves had made, if they were to have the real joy which ought to come with the receiving of presents.
Far too often children accept Christmas presents as so many added, material possessions, not as expressions of love and service from others. We had both long ago learned that only he who gives can truly, spiritually receive, and that a gift without this comprehension of its inner meaning is no gift at all, but merely something gained which oftentimes awakens greed and selfishness.
Therefore, by dint of raising up visions of how surprised grossmutter would be when Christmas morning came and she received two presents made by four little hands she loved, by enacting in dramatic detail the astonishment which their father would show when he too should receive a present made by them, we succeeded in awakening in them sufficient ambition to attempt what was to both of them a disagreeable task. They had been willing enough to draw, cut, fold, mold, or paste anything which would serve as an illustration of a story in which they were interested, or which would revivify some pleasant personal experience; but to sit down and deliberately draw, or paint, or sew an object for somebody else, with the thought of making it pleasant to that person rather than to themselves, was a new idea.
First one and then the other of us would occasionally sew a flower upon a picture-frame when the little untrained fingers grew too tired; or we would adroitly exchange work, letting them bring in a pail of water from the spring while we put a strip or two in a gay gold-and-scarlet mat which was to be worked over into a Christmas present, thus bringing the end of the little task somewhat nearer. Occasionally, of course, a story would be told of some loving little child about whom even the fairies sang, because he or she worked hard to make Christmas gifts for loved ones. Sometimes Margaret would exclaim: "What do you suppose the knights would say if they should come riding up the road and see two dear children working away as hard as they could on their Christmas presents?"
The first two presents, for grossmutter and father, their two nearest relatives, were finished and daintily folded away in colored tissue paper, when Margaret had a whispered conversation with them and suggested that they should surprise me also with a Christmas present, and I, on a like occasion, proposed to them that they should surprise her with something at Christmas time. Then followed days of whispered talk; of sudden hiding of work, or of gleeful shouting: "Go away! You mustn't come here now!"
Often there would be delighted covering up of the hands and lap at my approach, or at that of Margaret – scenes so common in the homes of Kindergarten-trained children, but so delightfully new to these little Arabs of the desert who had never, in all their short lives before, felt the dignity of individual, personal possessions which they could give away.
Our presents finished and mysteriously laid away, the next step was to lead to the thought of making presents for our next neighbor and his