Perhaps believing makes magic real

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We were at my stepson's football banquet, and Sam was wandering around, as Sam is wont to do.

He worked the crowd, studying faces. He ran to connect the dots created by the school cafeteria's colored floor tiles. He circled the empty salad bar, apparently quite taken by the view up through the clear plastic sneeze screen of the plastic vegetables decorating the structure's top.

Mostly I kept a distance, keeping him in sight but letting him sate his boundless two-year-old curiosity. But when he headed into the dark cafeteria kitchen, I moved in - I figured that would be the perfect place for him to make an unwelcome mess.

I entered the doorway to find him gazing up at a grandfatherly older man. The man glanced at me, his face crinkled into a smile.

"Sa'ta!" Sam said, pointing to some gold-wire-and-tree-bulb Christmas decorations on a counter.

"What's that?" the man said, his crinkled smile turned toward the eager uptilted face.

"Sa'ta!" Sam repeated.

"Santa," I interpreted.

"OOoooohhh!" the man said. "Well, there's an angel, and a reindeer, but no Santa."

"Well," I said, reaching for Sam's hand. "It's kind of all Santa to him."

And so it is. We've gotten out a few Christmas decorations, and Sam instantly finds the red-clad figure. "Sa'ta!" And even if he's not there, Sam imagines him. "Sa'ta!" he'll say. "Ch'ismas!"

Now, how deeply he gets the concept, I really don't know - but he knows that Ch'ismas and Sa'ta are special and exciting. He knows that Ch'ismas means lights and decorations and music; he can tell you that Sa'ta brings presents, though I'm not sure he knows what presents are. But it's all red and green and gold and shiny and happy and good, and that's all he needs.

And I have to say, I'm looking forward to this Christmas more than any other in years, maybe since my own childhood. Living it through him, seeing it through his eyes, gives it an innocent glow that I had almost forgotten.

The reason is, of course, that Sam still believes in magic - or rather, he has not yet learned to impose non-magical logic onto his mysterious and delightful world. When he's hungry, food appears. When he's thirsty, water appears. He doesn't know that the food appears because Mommy and Daddy went to the store, or that they bought it because they have jobs and make money. Our home is, to him, a fairy castle, not a mortgage.

So the thought of a jolly elf in a flying sleigh giving toys to children is not foreign or silly or illogical to him - it is a natural and fully believable extension of a world full of people who love him and care for him, a world where his needs and wants are understood, accepted and (mostly, anyway) met.

Now, it's been a good while since any of the other kids - now 17, 15, 14 and 12 - believed in Santa at all, and longer still since they simply and unquestioningly embraced the concept the way Sam does. On top of that, this is the first time in 13 years that I've gotten to live with a little child day-to-day through the season, and the last such Christmas - in 1995, when my daughter was four - was shadowed by the death throes of my first marriage.

During that time, I have been, like so many other grownups, a rather grumpy critic of the over-commercialized Santa-reindeer-spend-yourself-into-the-poorhouse aspects of Christmas. We've tried to keep that stuff simple and set aside time for the deeper, religious aspects of the holiday. Our kids have largely embraced that, and we've had wonderful celebrations.

But the glow in Sam's face has me looking at things a little differently. I'm seeing "Sa'ta" not as a polyester-garbed marketing ploy but as a symbol of joy, of the love of children, of the loving of giving. I'm seeing lights in the darkness of long December nights, and happy homes and stores as places of warmth in the cold - symbols all that connect quite nicely to the idea of the Lord himself being born into our world, bringing us light, warmth, love and joy.

And if right now Sam grasps the symbols better than he grasps the underlying meaning, well, isn't that the whole point of symbols? I see him gasp at the magic, and know that it will be that much easier to connect him to the real magic beneath it all.

And frankly, I see him gasp at the magic and I tend to gasp at the magic a little bit more myself. I find myself warming at the idea of Santa Claus. I want our tree up NOW; I want the lights and the decorations and the music so I can watch him get excited and can get excited myself. Somehow, he's sharing the magic with me.

And I find myself wondering: Perhaps there is something magic about magic. Perhaps if you believe in magic, then magic is real.

He believes, and it sure feels real.

Brian David/Oct. 29, 2008

Read the complete post at http://pittsburghmom.com/blogs/burghdad/archive/2008/12/04/perhaps-believing-makes-magic-real.aspx