I’ve always believed in Santa Claus.
I believed in Santa unquestioningly until the 4th grade when one of my friends told me he didn’t exist.
This friend made perfect sense, describing the parents loading the stockings after the kids had gone to bed and so on, but I went on believing in Santa anyway.
Because even as a youngster, I sensed that Christmas was one of the few times of year when people invited enchantment to touch their hearts. And Santa Claus was part of that.
At Christmastime, my yearlong, perpetual tendency toward in magic and enchantment was (is) de riguour.
With folks gathering in candlelight and singing about silence and stillness, about “heaven & nature singing”, I was (am) right at home.
So yeah, Santa Claus.
At this time of year, pathways lined with luminaries and houses turned into forts and clubhouses strewn with greenery and twinkling lights are the norm, and no one rolls their eyes about making offerings of cookies and milk to a giant elf (and apples and carrots to his flying reindeer).
So, I’ve always loved it.
Even as an angsty teenager, even as a 25 year old politically correct vegan, even as a middle-aged lady.
But I gotta say, I see the sweetness in every season, I hear heaven and nature singing a lot.
While it does come naturally, it’s not easy. It doesn’t just happen.
So it’s gotta be part of my practice, a discipline that allows enchantment to touch my heart whenever possible.
Along the lines of an echantment practice, here’s my favorite part of the famous unsigned editorial printed in the New York Sun in 1897, entitled Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus:
“You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”
Though they are anonymous, I count myself as part of this writer’s lineage, a line of humanity devoted to preserving wonder, delight, and magic.
So, who’s with me?
Who loves that there is a veil that only “faith, fancy, poetry, love and romance” can push aside?
If you do, it’s a sign of your magic, of your respect for the “beauty and glory” beyond the veils, and of your long-lived glad heart.
It means that, for us, this magic doesn’t stop once Santa has made his rounds and Christmas trees line the curb.
We feel it watching a quiet flock of turkeys walk single file across a frozen, sparkling field in February.
We feel it in March when the ephemerals push through the ground, followed by fat daffodils.
We’ll feel it on summer nights when fireflies float like fairies to a chorus of crickets, and again when the leaves turn crimson and float through the air like shining ghosts.
All of that is Santa Claus too, just at a different time of year. And Santa Claus is all that — the turkeys and daffodils and fireflies.
So long live Santa Claus.
Long live your wonder-filled heart.
love and magic all year,
xo
kv
PS: Vernors front and center, and Puma under the tree
