Victoria Grace Tucker | Spread the Christmas Joy

My earliest Christmas memory is when I was only two years old and I decided to give a flower to Santa in the mall. The previous year my Santa visit ended with me in tears. This year my mom decided to take me again and the day before I plucked a silk, white poinsettia from one of our Christmas decorations to gift to Santa Claus. My mom asked me if I wanted to give him a red flower or something else, but my toddler self insisted upon that particular flower.

The next day, Mom carted me off to the mall to see Santa Claus, the big scary old man in a red suit. When my turn had come in line to see the Big Man himself, I hesitantly walked toward Santa’s big red chair. I knew Santa Claus was supposed to be a nice man. He spent a whole night giving kids presents all around the world every year, right? He couldn’t be that bad. Still fear didn’t allow me to take a step forward.

The Santa Claus stood and bent down to my level and beckoned me to come. My fear decreased enough for me to approach him. He picked me up and put me in his lap and I offered him the flower. The Santa Claus was so grateful for the present that he showed me a pouch of his magic he uses to make his reindeer fly a.k.a. glitter. This made me feel incredibly special and from that day forward I stopped being afraid of Santa Claus.

Throughout childhood I’d never encountered another Santa Claus who was that kind to me.

Recalling this memory made me think about how our approach to God can be. Many a time we hear of God’s wrath and damnation and he seems very scary to us: The Big Man up in Heaven. We create a lot of ideas that may or may not be true about him. That he doesn’t care about us. That we can’t ever be close to someone we can’t see. That he’s mean. But when we humbly approach him and offer him our hearts we see those assumptions certainly aren’t true. We just have to have the courage to take the first step.

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

-Hebrews 4:16 ESV

Victoria Grace Howell is an award-winning, twenty-something aspiring novelist of speculative fiction hailing from Atlanta, Georgia. She loves to blog about geeky Christian writer things over on her blog (link to embed: http://storitorigrace.blogspot.com/). When she’s not writing, she’s drawing her characters, practicing Kung Fu, or enjoying some anime while sipping a hot cup of tea.