He researches the history and thought of early Christianity and early Judaism. Christianity is a religion centered on the notion of gift. It is no accident that Christmas, linked with what Christians consider the ultimate gift - the birth of Jesus, is a festival of gift-giving.
All sorts of historical and cultural traditions have accumulated around this festival, for good and ill, but one, it seems to me, has become especially problematic: the myth of Santa Claus. The form of giving we associate with Santa Claus is the very opposite of what counts, in the Christian tradition, as a good gift.
In the English-speaking world, Santa Claus originally St Nicholas is the man in the red coat and white beard to whom children address their requests for presents. For many, he becomes a bit like God, and as such, shapes their image of God as normally absent, occasionally useful, and generally benign. But if Santa is the distributor of gifts at Christmas, two things mark his giving: first, he gives according to merit; second, his giving is one-way and one-off, creating no relationship of trust, love, or obligation.
The famous Santa song is better known in North America than in the UK, but it has lasted long in the popular imagination. It has also shaped our ideas of gift-giving. At one level, this is an adult ploy to get children to behave at Christmas. But at another, it reflects a remorselessly moralizing society, quick to judge who is deserving of praise or blame. Santa is the projection of our sense that nothing good comes our way unless we somehow deserve it.
There is no friendship, no commitment, just one-way gifts that arrive without reciprocity or interpersonal depth. That fits Western individualism, where we dislike the constraints created by long-term relationships. What the early Christians celebrated about the gift of Jesus was that it was completely unconditioned: it was given without regard to merit or desert.
