Throughout the land this evening, children will go to bed early, having hung up their stockings with the endearing certainty that Santa will come down their chimneys again this Christmas Eve and deliver the presents they have been hoping for.
It is a child-like faith in the generosity of a loving but distant father-like figure that is close to the very meaning and truth of Christmas itself.
Over the past century or more, Saint Nicholas of Myra has been transformed by the commercialism of Coca -Cola and Manhattan. As the Christmas buying season begins increasingly early, Santa appears to arrive at shopping centres long before most of us have even drawn up our gift lists. But the original Nicholas is a far more appropriate image for children to cherish at Christmas than the figure who can enslave their parents to the demands of commercialism.
According to tradition, Nicholas of Myra was the sort of church leader who used what little personal wealth he had to save three girls threatened with being sold into prostitution by their destitute father. In the shape of that benign figure he has more present-day relevance to those families struggling with limited financial resources than to their counterparts who have been spending to excess in the last few weeks.
But Nicholas is also significant in a modern context as the Bishop of Myra (present-day Demre in Turkey). At one time Myra was the capital of Lycia, and one of the great ports where ships and sailors met as they plied the eastern Mediterranean between Asia, Europe and North Africa. Nicholas is said to have rescued sailors who were washed ashore and to have saved them from slavery. And his concerns for destitute children or those washed up on his shore are as relevant to our society now as ever. How many unaccompanied children, who have arrived in Ireland as asylum-seekers, would wish for a patron saint capable of rescuing them from deportation and the uncertainties that go with it?
The first gifts the Christ Child received in his manger were not from a dressed-up Santa. Nor were they bought in sparkling new shopping centres. They came from poor shepherds whose lives were characterised by low wages and long working hours, who were kept out in the dark and forced to work through the night. How many new immigrants to Ireland today are the victims of exploitation through the twin tyranny of low wages and long working hours?
And the presents brought later to the Christ Child by the three Wise Men, who braved a treacherous Herod, were not the mobile phones or cans of beer they are featured with on modern advertising hoardings. They were something very symbolic.
In reflecting on these features of our modern Christmas, it is surely the case that the Christ Child would be upset by the way Christmas marketing has commandeered the images of the crib, the Wise Men, and a wise Anatolian bishop.