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Santa's Birthday Santa celebrated another birthday during December and had some comments about birthdays in general that might interest you. This is what he said: ---------------0------------------- If you were to ask me "When is your birthday?" I would say "December 6th". "The Year?" "343 A.D." That would be truthful but it could also be misleading. Most mortals are not aware of it, but everyone can have two birthdays. First there’s your natal birthday, the day you physically arrive on the scene, and then there’s the date you are born into sainthood. I have no idea what my natal birthday was. Obviously I don’t remember and there is no written record of my arrival. Some say it was around 280 A.D., and that is probably close to correct. No matter. Whatever the date may have been is of little importance. Today people celebrate "natal" birthdays and they have ever since such organizations as the Bureau of Vital Statistics were established. But it hasn’t always been that way. When I was just getting started - during the third and fourth centuries - natal birthdays were rarely recorded. As a brand new baby, nobody knew what you might become, so people didn’t bother keeping track of when you got here - unless you were in line to become someone of earthly importance, such as a pharaoh or possibly a king. But birth into sainthood? Now that was something else… In his book Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, Charles Panati explains it very well. He says: "To the early followers of Christ, who were oppressed, persecuted, and martyred… and who believed that infants entered this world with the original sin of Adam condemning their souls - the world was a harsh cruel place. There was no reason to celebrate one’s arrival. But since death was the true deliverance, the passage to eternal paradise, every person’s death day merited prayerful observance." He goes on to quote an early defender of the Church: "A birthday of a saint, is not that in which they are born in the flesh, but that in which they are born from earth into heaven, from labor to rest." Today when you see references to "birthdays" in anything printed prior to 1800, there is a very good chance they are referring to "birth into sainthood." For some, death ends one’s work. Not so for a saint. If you live the "Good Life" people remember. Your spirit lives on. You become an immortal spirit, a saint. And year after year people celebrate your birth into sainthood often emulating you. I am fortunate. What I came to believe and how I lived my life resulted in my canonization as of December 6, 343 A.D., the date of my birth into sainthood. On that day I ceased being a person and became a spirit. Today I am over sixteen hundred years old - headed for the big "0, 0, 0." And as an immortal spirit, I can never die. ----------------0-------------------- This is just one more reason why when a child asks, "Is there a Santa Claus/" the answer has to be "Yes." I’ll be in touch next month. Santa's Friend Glenn
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