{"id":2185,"date":"2022-12-02T07:08:43","date_gmt":"2022-12-02T12:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2185"},"modified":"2022-12-02T07:08:43","modified_gmt":"2022-12-02T12:08:43","slug":"miracle-on-34th-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/12\/02\/miracle-on-34th-street\/","title":{"rendered":"Miracle on 34th Street"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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(c) 20th Century Fox<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>.
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Throughout the season of Advent \u2013 which this year encompasses the four weeks leading up to December 25 \u2013 we\u2019re looking at classic Christmas movies and how they might connect us to the miracle of God choosing to become a human being.<\/em>
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Children climbing into bed on Christmas Eve have always wrestled with some serious questions about Santa Claus.
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How can he possibly visit all the homes in the world in a single night?\u00a0 What about the places that don\u2019t have chimneys?\u00a0 And how can he cram all those presents onto a single sleigh?
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Hannah Fry and Thomas Oleron Evans, a pair of mathematicians, plumb such mysteries in their 2017 book The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus<\/em>.\u00a0 According to their calculations, Santa has to zip around the world at approximately 3,000 times the speed of sound and deliver something like 300,000 tons<\/em> of presents.\u00a0
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A few years earlier, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly<\/em> proposed that if the Jolly Old Elf drops in on all the children ages 14 and under who live in the countries where Christmas is celebrated, he would be visiting 526 million kids.\u00a0 That would mean 22 million children each hour, or 365,000 per minute, or (to round things off) 6,100 per second.\u00a0 He can improve those numbers, of course, by wisely flying from east to west across the world\u2019s time zones, extending his delivery time to 32 hours.
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Regardless, this guy has to hustle. \u00a0Santa doesn\u2019t have a lot of discretionary time to sample every plate of cookies and chug every glass of milk.\u00a0 If he did, Fry and Evans calculate he would ingest about 90 billion calories in one night.\u00a0 That leaves us pondering the age-old question: \u00a0Does Santa get immensely larger every Christmas Eve, or does he maintain his physique by shimmying up and down all those chimneys?
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A writer in the science journal Nature<\/em> has proposed that Santa must be \u201ca macroscopic quantum object,\u201d an identity that allows him to be in multitudes of places simultaneously.\u00a0 Who knew that quantum mechanics would one day rescue Christmas?\u00a0
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The reality of Santa Claus is front and center in 1947\u2019s Miracle on 34th<\/sup> Street<\/em>, a movie that presents nothing magical or supernatural, dabbles in plenty of cynicism, yet still manages to create a palpable sense of wonder.
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The story revolves around Kris Kringle, a Macy\u2019s department store Santa in New York City who thinks he\u2019s\u2026well, the real Santa.\u00a0
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A young girl named Susan, played by Natalie Wood, is skeptical.\u00a0 She\u2019s been taught not to believe in fairy tales.\u00a0 The adults in her world, including the directors of Macy\u2019s, are torn.\u00a0 Kris is good for business.\u00a0 The children love him, which means their parents stick around to shop.\u00a0 But some of them conclude this Santa-pretender must be certifiably crazy.\u00a0
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Susan\u2019s doubts are challenged when she witnesses the moment another young girl \u2013 a shy Dutch orphan who has been adopted by an American family but cannot speak English \u2013 comes to meet Kringle.\u00a0 Kris effortlessly begins to speak and sing in Dutch, delighting the girl.\u00a0 If he\u2019s the real Santa Claus, he should know every language, right?\u00a0 Now both Susan and the audience are beginning to wonder.
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Check out the heartwarming scene for yourself:\u00a0 Miracle on 34th street Dutch girl – YouTube<\/a>
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As Jeremy Arnold explains in his book Christmas at the Movies<\/em>, 69-year-old character actor Edmund Gwenn realized this was the role of a lifetime.\u00a0 He packed on extra pounds to play Santa \u2013 and never really got back to his previous weight.\u00a0 But he did win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.\u00a0 Gripping his Oscar he memorably said, \u201cNow I know<\/em> there\u2019s a Santa Claus!\u201d\u00a0
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The executives at 20th<\/sup> Century Fox, fearful that the movie might bomb, decided to release it not in December but during the summer, when moviegoing crowds were bigger.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 Audience members experienced Christmas in July.\u00a0 Letters addressed to Santa began to pour into Fox\u2019s mailroom.
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Followers of Jesus have never known exactly what to do with Santa Claus.\u00a0 How did this pale figure of fantasy end up taking center stage during the Christmas season, even while manger scenes are excluded from public holiday displays?
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Before we push back against the North Pole\u2019s most famous resident, however, it\u2019s worth noting that St. Nicholas, the inspiration for Santa Claus, was definitely not a pale figure of fantasy.
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Nicholas (A.D. 270-343) was the Bishop of Myra, a thriving community in what is now Turkey.\u00a0 The only child of wealthy Christian parents, he received a large inheritance when both his mother and father perished during an epidemic. \u00a0He spent much of his life giving away his personal fortune to the sick, the suffering, and the poor.
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The most celebrated account of Nicholas\u2019 generosity concerns three little girls who were growing up in a poor family.\u00a0Their father would never have been able to afford dowries for his daughters.\u00a0 Without a dowry, a young woman would have been hard pressed to find a husband, and might be forced into prostitution or slavery.
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When the oldest girl came of age, Nicholas anonymously threw a bag of gold coins through the family\u2019s open window.\u00a0 He did the same thing two more times as the others grew up.\u00a0 All three were thus able to marry.\u00a0 The story circulated that the bags of coins landed either in shoes or stockings that were drying by the fire.\u00a0 Children have been hanging up stockings or setting out shoes ever since in the hope of receiving gifts.
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Today Nicholas is not only the Catholic Church\u2019s patron saint of children, but of those trapped in sex trafficking (because of his intercession on behalf of those young girls) and of pawn brokers (which is why the traditional signage identifying a pawnshop features three bags of gold).
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Nicholas became the prototype for Santa Claus, whose name derives from the Dutch \u201cSinterklaas,\u201d a transliteration of \u201cSaint Nicholas.\u201d\u00a0 Santa gradually morphed into the waistline-challenged, chimney-rappelling, reindeer-loving Arctic elf under the influence of American writers and commercial marketers.
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But what about Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th<\/sup> Street<\/em>?\u00a0 Does he turn out to be the real Santa?\u00a0 It\u2019s best that you find out for yourself by watching the movie.\u00a0 \u00a0
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Natalie Wood, for one, was a true believer.\u00a0 She was just eight years old during filming.\u00a0 Her character, Susan, wrestles with doubts.\u00a0 But later in life Natalie admitted that she genuinely believed Edmund Gwenn was<\/em> the real Santa Claus.\u00a0
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Behind the seemingly trite fa\u00e7ade that we see on Christmas cards and in ads for Coca-Cola and M&M\u2019s we can hear the historical echoes of something real.\u00a0 \u00a0
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There once was a man who devoted his life to raising the hopes and improving the lives of poor children.
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And we don\u2019t have to star in a holiday movie to make that very same cause our own.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here.\u00a0Throughout the season of Advent \u2013 which this year encompasses the four weeks leading up to December 25 \u2013 we\u2019re looking at classic Christmas movies and how they might connect us to the miracle of God choosing to become a human being.\u00a0Children climbing into bed on Christmas Eve have always wrestled with… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2186,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[539],"class_list":["post-2185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christmas-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2187,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2185\/revisions\/2187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}