by Samuel from Nashville, Tennessee Writes Santa About Bible Verses
Dear Santa,
My name is Samuel and I am ten years old. I live in Nashville, Tennessee, which my dad calls the buckle of the Bible Belt, which I looked up and means we take faith seriously here, which we do. My Sunday school teacher told me that Saint Nicholas was a real Christian bishop and that you come from him. I have been thinking about this ever since. I have three questions.
What are your five favorite Bible verses?
Why is Tennessee shaped like a rectangle but not quite?
Why do some people celebrate Christmas and some people do not?
Thank you.
Samuel David Garrett
Nashville, Tennessee
Dear Samuel,
Your Sunday school teacher is correct, and I want to say that before I say anything else. Saint Nicholas of Myra — a bishop in what is now Turkey, who lived in the fourth century and died on December 6th, 343 AD — is where I come from. He was a Christian man who read the scriptures carefully, took them seriously, and then did something rarer than most people manage: he actually lived them. He gave away his inheritance to the poor. He helped families in secret so they would not know who to thank. He defended the innocent. He stood for the gospel at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD when it cost something to stand there. I am what happens when a story like that travels across seventeen centuries and picks up a sleigh along the way. The faith at the centre of it has not changed. Your Sunday school teacher knows her history. Tell her I said so.
Now. My five favourite Bible verses. I have thought about this carefully, because you asked carefully, and these five are the ones that have lived in me the longest.
The first is Luke 2:10-11. “But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.'” This is the verse I think of every single Christmas Eve when the sleigh lifts off the North Pole into the dark. Good news. Great joy. For all the people. Not some of the people. Not the deserving people. All the people. I have never found a better description of what Christmas Eve is supposed to feel like from the inside of the operation, and I have had several centuries to look.
The second is Matthew 6:3-4. “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” This was Saint Nicholas’s guiding verse and it is mine. He threw bags of gold through windows at night so nobody would know who gave them. He helped people in secret because the help was for them, not for his reputation. Every gift I deliver is delivered while the house is asleep. No audience. No credit taken. The verse is not just a rule I follow — it is the shape of the whole operation.
The third is Acts 20:35. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Jesus said this. It is one of only a handful of things Jesus said that is recorded in the New Testament but not in the four Gospels — Paul quotes it in Acts from memory, passing it along the way you pass along something that changed you. I have spent several centuries delivering gifts and I will tell you from direct experience that this verse is empirically true. The joy on the giving side is larger than the joy on the receiving side, and the joy on the receiving side is already considerable. Give something this Christmas, Samuel, that costs you something. You will understand the verse from the inside.
The fourth is Isaiah 9:6. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Isaiah wrote this seven hundred years before the night in Bethlehem. Seven hundred years. And every word of it landed exactly. I have read a great deal of writing in several centuries and I have never encountered a sentence that waited longer for its meaning to arrive, or arrived more completely when it did. Every time I fly over Bethlehem on Christmas Eve I think of Isaiah writing this in the dark, not knowing when, only knowing it was coming. That kind of faith is something I have enormous respect for.
The fifth is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” I have saved this one for last not because it is the least important — it is the most important — but because it is the verse that contains all the others. It is why there is a Christmas. It is why the angels appeared to the shepherds. It is why Isaiah wrote what he wrote in the dark seven hundred years before it happened. It is why Saint Nicholas gave everything he had away in secret — because he had understood what had already been given for him and giving was the only response that made sense. God gave. Saint Nicholas gave. I give. The shape of the whole story is a gift, freely offered, not because it was earned but because love gives. That is Christmas, Samuel. That is all of it, in one verse.
Why is Tennessee shaped like a rectangle but not quite?
Tennessee is one of the most geographically interesting states in the union and its shape tells you a great deal about how the country was put together. The basic rectangle comes from the survey lines drawn when Tennessee was carved out of the western territory of North Carolina and admitted to the union in 1796 as the sixteenth state. Surveyors in the eighteenth century worked with compasses, chains, and the stars, and they tried to draw straight lines along parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude. They did not always succeed perfectly, because the technology of the time was imperfect and the terrain — particularly in the mountainous east — made precision difficult.
The northern border with Kentucky and Virginia follows roughly the 36°30′ parallel but wanders slightly because it was surveyed in sections by different teams at different times, not always with consistent results. The southern border with Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi follows the 35th parallel with similar imperfections. The eastern border with North Carolina follows the mountain ridgeline of the Appalachians in some sections rather than a straight surveyed line, which is why it bends. And the western tip — where Tennessee meets Missouri and Arkansas at the Mississippi River — has that distinctive pointed shape because the Mississippi River does not follow a surveyor’s straight line. It follows geography, which has no interest in rectangles.
The result is a state that is nearly five times as long as it is wide — roughly 440 miles east to west and only about 120 miles north to south at its widest point — making it one of the most elongated states in the country. Tennessee contains three distinct regions that Tennesseans are very serious about: East Tennessee, Middle Tennessee where Nashville sits, and West Tennessee, each with its own geography, culture, and opinion about barbecue, which I have been navigating diplomatically for several centuries.
Why do some people celebrate Christmas and some people do not?
This is your social studies question and it is a good one, and I want to give you the honest answer because you are a child in Nashville who takes faith seriously and you deserve a reply that takes your question seriously.
Christmas is first and foremost the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem — the miraculous birth, announced by angels, laid in a manger because there was no room at the inn, worshipped by shepherds who came in from the fields and wise men who followed a star. This is what Christmas is. Everything else — the tree, the gifts, the carols, the sleigh — grew up around that central fact across twenty centuries of tradition, culture, and human creativity.
People who do not celebrate Christmas include those of other faiths — Jewish families observe Hanukkah and the traditions of Judaism; Muslim families observe their own holy calendar; Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh families have their own profound and ancient celebrations. These families are not rejecting Christmas carelessly. They are living faithfully within their own traditions, which have their own beauty and depth, and which I respect entirely, as Saint Nicholas would have wanted me to. He was a bishop, not a bully. He gave to the poor regardless of who they were.
Some Christian communities do not celebrate Christmas either — certain Protestant denominations historically objected to the holiday on the grounds that December 25th is not the biblically specified date of Jesus’s birth, and that many Christmas customs absorbed from non-Christian traditions were not appropriate for Christian observance. These are sincere theological positions held by serious people and they deserve to be understood rather than dismissed.
And then there are people who do not celebrate Christmas for no religious reason at all — because of family circumstances, financial hardship, personal grief, or simply because it is not a tradition they grew up with. These people are not wrong. They are simply in a different place than you are on December 25th, and the correct response from a child in Nashville who takes faith seriously is the same response Saint Nicholas would have given: kindness, generosity, and the quiet understanding that the good news announced in Luke 2:10 was for all the people, which means it belongs to everyone to encounter in their own time and on their own terms.
Merry Christmas, Samuel. Your three questions were excellent and your Sunday school teacher should be proud. So should your dad. Nashville is a fine city and the Bible Belt buckle is in good hands when the next generation asks questions like yours.
Your friend,
Santa Claus
The North Pole
P.S. Zechariah 2:6 reads: “Ho, ho, come forth from the land of the north.” I did not write the Bible but I appreciate the mention.
