Hello and welcome to Faith at Jason, a spinoff of the Bible Binge podcast where we send

up our faith and tend to see if we can get reception in unlikely places.

I'm your host, Erin Moon, resident Bible scholar on the Bible Binge, and this month join

me as we walk right down Santa Claus Lane to chat about that jolly old elf, St. Nick,

Chris Cringle, Santa Claus.

A quick disclaimer before we begin, Faith is very personal and everyone brings their

own set of lenses and perspectives to anything they encounter in the world, and that includes

scripture, religion, faith. I always welcome General Rapique's and additional thoughts,

as well as attention to blind spots I may not have considered. This is a conversation.

If this is spiritual archaeology, I want us to dig together. And there is an additional

disclaimer for this particular episode that we will be talking about a certain Christmas

time joybringer. And if you have little ears that do not need a podcast host telling them secret

insider information, you might want to wait before you listen to it in front of them.

Good news, however, there will be something fun and special dropping in the feed just for those

little ears very, very soon. So before we start, I think it's important to establish a baseline

of my own personal history with Santa Claus and also kind of how we do it at the lunar module.

So I grew up with Santa and I have no memory of figuring out like the actual deal. But if you ask

my mom, I technically still believe in Santa because at our house, Santa did stockings and stockings

are the best part of Christmas outside of Jesus obviously. And my mom says, if you do not believe,

you do not receive, which I think translates roughly to do not squeal to the younger kids. Also,

if you make like a public profession of disfaith in Santa, guess who doesn't actually get presents

from Santa? You and I am extremely gift oriented. So this is very important to me. Now, when

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