IT'S JESUS' BIRTHDAY, WHY DO WE GET ALL THE GIFTS?

This morning I greeted the new day with a light heart and a dynamic spirit.  It is the eve of St. Nicholas day and tomorrow I am going to get a nice gift from that jolly old Dutchman.  I am going to go to the office and the fruit of my labors will be awaiting me. ($)   You know what, I deserve it.  I don't have to wait for Santa Claus and I don't really even need St. Nicholas.  What I do need is the health that God gives me every day.  The same health that he has given me for so many years now.  God has been blessing me for a lot longer than Santa Claus can even imagine.  In fact, one year not too long before Christmas day I, as a child, was sick again with pneumonia and the doctor had come to the house in response to my mother's call.  (That's how old I am.  Doctors used to come to the house to care for you.)  This one time I heard the doctor say, "If he gets pneumonia again within the next year or two he could die."  I was about six or seven at the time.  You know what I did?  I just simply said to myself, "So I just won't get sick any more."  You know what?  It was rare  that I did get sick from that time on.  And not one more time with pneumonia...approaching the century mark and still going strong!  By then, I had discovered that Santa Claus was a fairy tale, so there was no desire to involve him in this matter from the beginning.
I am shocked, to this day, that my parents forbade me to warn my younger siblings about the fraud that Santa Claus is.  My parents were so Catholic in every other way.  But they had this thing about Santa Claus.  When I convinced them that they were not fooling me, my father refused to believe that I had come to the conclusion on my own.  I simply told him that the proof was on the tags that were attached to the gifts.  You know, "From uncle Art" and so on.  Why not "From Santa" or "From Joe the Elf, North Pole."  Here I was not yet 8 years old and I won an argument with my parents.  And this was not even on religious grounds. I never once used the hammer, "That's what Sister Mary of the Icy North Pole said."   Come to think of it, I cannot remember a single time when a nun made a remark for or against Santa Claus.  Does any one of you have any recollection of such a thing?
When it came time to celebrate Christmas with our two boys, we never overshadowed Jesus with Santa.  When someone gave them a gift, they thanked the person who gave the gift, not Santa.  Every Christmas Day  we had a serious birthday cake for Jesus and had relatives in the house to make it a small, but meaningful party.
Do I hold it against my parents that they were not the ones to disabuse me of the lie?  No.  I figure that with Santa or without him I would still be as warped as I am now.  So I guess it falls under the rubric, "No harm, no foul."
Notice:  While I was looking for an appropriate picture for this "Thought" I found the one at the top, left.  If you want to check out another man's thoughts on the same subject, click here, I recommend it.