Turns out Santa Claus is a privationist. And assuming Santa’s privationist sensibilities can explain why coal for the naughty truly is a gift and not a punishment. Or at very least, as Tolkien would ask, “Which of God’s judgements are not also gifts?”

Coal is a grace, even a sort of Christmas sacrament. Here’s how this came about:

After a texting debate concerning the etymologies of naughty and nice with Dr. Cirilla of College of the Ozarks and Dr. Giltner of University of St. Francis, we three concluded that the naughty or nice list more features the current alignment of the collected hearts and minds of the world in respect to the goodness and truth of being, rather than the obedience of a specific parent’s wishes.

Let’s start with the nice list.

Featured Download: full manuscript of Twas the night Before Christmas.

The word “nice” has perhaps the weirdest, most bipolar etymology of any word in the English language. It comes from the Latin “ni” meaning “not” and “sciere” like “science” meaning “to know.” As in ignorant or agnostic. Nice started out in the 13^th century meaning something like silly or thoughtless or even just stupid and senseless. It came by the 19^th century to mean kind and thoughtful. I suppose if we’re going to make any sense of this nice list as amateur philologists and metaphysicians, it could be that the children on Santa’s nice list are those who have admitted they know very little in the face of unblinking consciousness: their own ignorance in the teeth of just how much exists, just how many things and how many minds there are to know, moves them to be thoughtful in the presence of others. Kids on the nice list want to learn, they want to grow, they want to defer to the grace and mind and beauty in others — they want to point outside of themselves to the beauty of being — and so they first admit they do not know and therefore open themselves to learn whatever the person or thing in front of them has to offer.

We might say that only the grateful heart of a poor and starving nice child can truly appreciate the prodigality of any one of the sails in the Manhattan Yacht Club. Or even its tiny LEGO counterpart in the LEGO store.

The spoiled naughty rich kid cannot enjoy the five-thousand-dollar LEGO set precisely because he doesn’t know the meaning and beauty of a stick.

Meanwhile, the nice and grateful poor kid who knows the beauty and building potentia of that single stick is awestruck with the five-thousand-dollar LEGO set he’ll never own.

For this reason it’s hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven: the abundance of possessions can crowd out the faith found in the average poor child.

Take the naughty list.

Few realize how cleanly the list shares an etymological root with the word “naught” as in “nonentity” or “nothing-as-such” or perhaps the same word in computer coding lingo or the representation of zero, such as when we Millennials try to sound old and wise and dignified by saying, “Back in the early aughties—”(exhibit A: Ruth Graham). The naughty list contains the names of those in league with non-being. Their naughtiness is their attempt to move further down, further away from being. One might say Santa’s naughty list contains the names of all of the potential passengers in the bus at the start of The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, the names of those who seek power and greed and basic addictions and even the lauds of the elite over the literal well-being of their neighbors. Like the spideress Shelob in Tolkien’s work, those on the naughty list spin their naughty webs using light for fuel — for prima materia — until they run out of light and consume themselves.

That’s why coal’s a mercy, a grace: Santa makes a sacrament of common coal.

Coal, as raw black carbon, is quite like lead in the alchemical great work. Coal is the raw potential of being. It makes light and heat. With it you can warm a house that, like Dante’s hell, hath frozen over in darkness. With coal you can write human history’s collected thoughts on the sidewalks of the Union Square. With coal you can illumine the darkest corners of the developing world. In terms of raw carbon, all life starts out as coal: dust beggared of the breath and mind of God. Coal could be any gift and so the gift of coal whispers of the potential to receive any gift, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear the crackling fire of God that waits not to consume but to resume: to resurrect what has been burned so that it turns back from coal into a treasure chest, a home, a paintbrush, a baseball bat. Coal whispers that any gift on your wishlist might not have been. Coal speaks a sacrament over all who see the miracle’s not that children get gifts at Christmas, the miracle’s that every Christmas gift could have been left ungiven, could have burnt in a fire. That every gift could have been coal — or worse, could have been naught — sanctifies whatever gifts we give or receive this season. The worst knitted socks, when wrapped, speak of an almost-barefootedness. The worst pen or most irrelevant book of a near-illiterate experience. The unwanted fruitcake of a world that almost was: a world in which you could neither have cake nor eat it neither. The tackiest tourist thimble of another world where fingers have no protection and therefore always get pricked by needles. If given the candy you hate this Christmas, remember: but for the grace of God, we nearly lived in a world without cane sugar.

For this reason, the naughty list reads more like a demographic survey before Santa’s mission of gratitude and generosity: a list of children whom Santa has yet to convince of the heat and light predicating winter’s cold dark nights. The coal speaks of those stuck thinking it’s always winter and never Christmas.

Metaphysically speaking, Santa doesn’t give naughty kids coal as a punishment, but as a grace.

Because until you can learn to be grateful for the being of coal existing right in the teeth of the abyss, everything you have and everything you are will come to naught.

Featured Download: full manuscript of Twas the night Before Christmas.