Pulpit-bashing of Santa Claus an attack on the spirit of Christmas

YOU would imagine that the Church of England has enough to contend with than trying to knock Santa off his sleigh.

That is the latest heresy - and heresy it is - which has rocked this bastion of the Establishment.

When the Rev. Lee Rayfield, vicar of St. Peter’s, near Maidenhead, Berkshire, denounced Santa Claus from the pulpit, one almost expected a statement from the Palace, because as head of that church, the queen, presumably, was not amused.

Not amused, certainly, were the parents who brought their little believers from St. Piran’s School to the local church for a traditional carol service.

However, when the reverend gave his sermon he decided to adopt a scientific approach, rather than a traditional one, to the festive season.

Quite simply he told the congregation that Rudolph and the other reindeer would burst into flames if they had to travel at the speeds necessary to get round the globe in a single night.

Santa Claus would also vaporise because of the speed of his international efforts on behalf of children the world over, the vicar added, just to really get the message across.

There was shock and horror among his young audience. Of course, there was. They had just heard the vicar blow a good little earner every year out of the water, or, more appropriately, out of the sky.

If their parents thought that the kids thought the game was up, because of the stupidity of the vicar, then the chances of a happy and expensive Christmas was gone, like last year’s reindeer tracks in the drive.

So now the kids in the parish near Maidenhead are desperately trying to convince their parents that they don’s believe a word the vicar said, and the parents are desperate to believe them.

Strange, isn’t it, that those parents have to tell the kids that the vicar was telling a pack of lies from the pulpit so that they can continue to enjoy Christmas. The parents, I mean.

Stranger still, that the vicar’s credibility and reputation is now totally shot to pieces, and he now realises that, indeed, the truth is stranger than fiction.

Afterwards, he attempted a damage limitation exercise, but the parents weren’t having any of it. They were quite right too, because he had just ruined Christmas.

The reverend compounded his major faux pas by telling the truth. If he told a porkie and confessed to having been at the altar wine, most of the congregation would have had a bit of sympathy for him and explained to the kids that he was locked.

But no, he said he had misjudged the ages of the children when he regaled them with the spoof he had come across on the Internet.

“I made a serious misjudgement of the ages of the children,” he said. “I did not realise how young some of them were and I am sitting here now wondering how I managed not to realise.”

Come on, I mean the carol service was for children from a junior school, and all he had to do was look around him. Did he think he was talking to rocket scientists?

Having recanted, the Rev. Rayfield is writing to the parents and the letters will be distributed, not by Santa Claus, but by the principal of the school.

In doing a u-turn, he is following the example of another famous vicar from the shire. He is rather like Simon Aleyn, who was appointed to the parish of Bray in Berkshire during Henry VIII’s reign. Simon wasn’t quite as simple as the old nursery rhyme would suggest, and was, in fact, politically astute when it came to a question of faith. He changed his faith to Catholic when Mary I was on the throne and back to Protestant when Elizabeth I succeeded and so retained his living.

But the Rev. Rayfield was unlucky, really, to find himself in the middle of this controversy, because, ironically, the vicar was merely doing the parishioners of the Anglican St. Mary’s Church a favour. They’re without their own vicar at the moment, and he agreed to toddle over from his own nearby parish of St. Peter’s.

Now, there are probably two parishes without a vicar.

Ulrika Jonsson, the television presenter, whose eight year-old son Cameron attends the private junior school, said that the sermon was “every parent’s nightmare.”

“Cameron still believes in Father Christmas, but anything could tip the scales. I have told him that just because the vicar doesn’t believe in Father Christmas, it does not mean that he can’t,” she said.

Cameron, actually, may get over the vicar’s heresy because he has the proof of his own eyesight that the jolly old man in the red suit does exist. According to his mother, Cameron saw reindeer tracks in the drive last year, so she has nothing to worry about there. Well, nothing that a good optician can’t straighten out.

It’s a pity Rev. Rayfield didn’t check newspaper archives rather than the Internet before he delivered his heretical homily on Santa. If he did, he might have come across the following.

On September 21, 1897, the New York Sun published an editorial headed “Is there a Santa Claus?” Virginia O’Hanlon (8) had written to the editor and asked if the famous old man really existed, for her father told her that if she read it in a newspaper it must be so.

Leader writer Francis Pharcellus Church was given the job of answering Virginia. Having attacked scepticism, Francis Pharcellus wrote:

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.

We would have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

“Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to watch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus.

“The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

“You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love and romance can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond . Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

“No Santa Claus! Thank God he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

So, you see, it’s sometimes better to believe what you read in the paper than what you hear from the pulpit.

It’s a matter of faith.

Ask Ulrika!