There is an unfortunate commercial airing now for some cable or satellite television company. 

Here’s the scene: Grandparents are eagerly awaiting the arrival of their family for the Christmas holidays. However, the couple learns that their young grandchildren are dreading the visit since the rather technologically challenged grandma and grandpa don’t have 10 zillion channels.

So, the nice elderly couple signs up for whatever service being advertised. The closing scene is of the family cheerfully gathered around a big-screen TV. 

Sad. Is this what the holidays have come to?

Maybe the family in this ad had already huddled around a twinkling Christmas tree and exchanged gifts then had a big Christmas meal with all the fixings. Perhaps they had already bundled up against the cold and attended a candles and carols service or went caroling through their neighborhood.

Who knows. 

More likely, they had donned their coats, but instead of singing, they went shopping at the mall. 

Whether its attending church or sitting on Santa’s lap, the purpose of Christmas is for us to renew our faith, not only in a spiritual sense, but also in our fellow man. Many of us question our beliefs.

In 1897, 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon asked the same basic question when she asked if Santa was real? She wrote a letter to the New York Sun. “Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?”  

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong,” wrote veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church. “They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.”

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” Church writes. He talked about the childlike belief in Santa delivering toys as well as the adult desire to believe as a way to rekindle the innocence stolen by the Grinch of time.

That was 115 years ago and Church refers to the “skepticism of a skeptical age.” Not much has changed since then. 

We again, perhaps still, live in a cynical time. With Christmas advertisements bombarding us from all directions and many advertisers linking the joy of the season with how much we spend, often on things that only keep us apart.

Church assured O’Hanlon that, indeed, Santa was real. With this, he assured all of us that there is a spirit of Christmas that transcends age.

That is something we can’t find on television.

Merry Christmas.

Dale Hogg