30 November 2011 | 4 Kislev 5772

I have never celebrated Christmas, but I have always enjoyed this time of year…especially when I was a child growing up in snow – blanketed Minnesota. When I was a young child my family had a Christmas Eve tradition.  That was the night we hopped into the family car for our annual tour of the city’s highlight Christmas lights displays. As a child, I found the displays to be enchanting. Once or twice, I can remember arriving back home, plopping myself down on the living room couch (very quietly so that my mother, of blessed memory, wouldn’t realize that I had entered this “forbidden space”), looking up into the sky through the large picture window and wondering where Santa Claus and his reindeer were at the moment. I knew that Santa Claus didn’t really exist, but the lights displays had stimulated my imagination.

How different that image of Santa Claus has become today amidst our troubling economy! According to the New York Times, this year’s 115 Santa Claus “graduates” from the nation’s oldest Santa Claus training program, the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School in Midland, Michigan…

“…must learn to swiftly size up families’ financial circumstances, gently scale back children’s Christmas gift requests and even how to answer the wish some say they have been hearing with more frequency — ‘Can you bring my parent a job?’”

Given the raised expectations that both the marketplace and, in a number of instances, parents have created over a number of years, I commend anyone who can successfully lower a child’s expectations about Christmas parents without simultaneously deflating him. That’s a tough job.

But for those of us who do not have to deal with such things (notwithstanding similarly high expectations we have created regarding Chanukah presents) we can recognize some important issues to reflect on based on the skills the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School has had to teach this year’s graduates.

I immediately recognize two issues: how to adapt to changed circumstances and how to deal with disappointment.

Santa Claus trainees are schooled in how to respond to children who cannot possibly get the things they ask Santa to deliver.

Our own tradition offers different paradigms including one found in this week’s parasha, Vayetze. Consider the story of Jacob marrying both Leah and Rachel.  You know it well. When Laban deceives Jacob by replacing Rachel with Leah, the Torah text is terse regarding Jacob’s response. He simply committed to another seven years of service to Laban in order to marry Rachel.  That’s it. No rage. No ranting or raving from Jacob.  Just plain “rolling with the punches” and dealing with reality.

When life takes us in unexpected directions and/or we aren’t able to get what we really want to have, Jacob’s example tells us to accept the reality…and then, to the extent it may be within our power to do so, continue to work to get to the place we seek.  

Of course, there are no promises. Additional efforts may not bring us what we desire.

Fred Honerkamp, a graduate of the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School, who now lectures there, reinforces that thought, “In the end, Santas have to be sure to never promise anything.”

Deal with reality.  Accept it.  Seek to change it, if it is possible to do so. And in the end, recognize and accept that there are no promises.