It's Christmas Eve; At those households that sustain the myth, Santa will soon be coming down the chimney, or through the window, or down a chimney Santa made himself and then made disappear (this my parents told me). He'll drop his presents and take his cookies and continue on flying at an impossible speed to take care of the rest of the world's millions of children.
For those of you with children, you may or may have not told them some version of this story. Perhaps you're at the point of "telling the truth" about Santa, or already have long ago. What happens to Santa after you stop believing in him? G.K. Chesterton wondered something similar. Writing in Commonweal in 1935, he asks:
Is the child to live in a world that is entirely false? Or is the child to be forbidden all forms or fancy; or in other words, forbidden to be a child? Or is he, as we say, to have some harmless borderland of fancy in childhood, which is still part of the land in which he will live: in terra viventium, in the land of living men? Cannot the child pass from a child's natural fancy to a man's normal faith in Holy Nicholas of the Children without enduring that bitter break and abrupt disappointment which now marks the passage of the child from a land of make-believe to a world of no belief?
Read all of "Santa Claus and Science" here, and have a happy Christmas Eve. If you want to track Santa's global journey by satellite, you can do so here.
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