Ring. Ring. "Hello." "Son, it's for you!" Can you imagine his face when he picks up the phone to find Santa? He'd want to call all his friends that he got a Santa call. Santa phone calls are just one of the many things we do for children during the holidays. We all want them to have a magical experience. We do them not just at Christmas but at other holidays as well. We work hard to build a world of safety and magic that childhood should be.
We can be reasonably sure that there are no large, jolly elves that fly around once a year on domesticated reindeer live at the North Pole on a street called Santa Lane. None the less we tell children that there is such an elf. Once a year, in the middle of the night, we stuff gifts under a recently slaughtered tree. We drink the milks and eat the cookies that had been left for him. Kids watch parades with him in it and even see him at the mall (don't take the kids to two malls in one day, too many questions!). We are creating the magical world of childhood. Santa is the biggest example but hardly the only one. They exist in all sorts of ways in all sorts of seasons.
To stay in winter for a bit there is Frosty the Snowman. He got so ingrained in our child-magic world that we named a tasty treat after him. Can you honestly say when you make a snow man that you don't use 3 balls of snow and look for a carrot? And if you have a stove top hat and a corn cob pipe you know you are going to use them. As we move into spring and Frosty melts away we come across another denizen of the child's world of imagination. This time it is a large bunny that loves to leave candy and is OCD about hiding brightly colored chicken eggs.
With those spring showers come rainbows and we tell the children about the pot of gold that the leprechauns have hidden at the end of it. Face it, we have all chased a rainbow. Then you have the dreaded tooth snatching demon. Sorry, I mean the tooth fairy but adults play it up. If you leave the tooth under your pillow the tooth fairy will take it and leave you money.
Next comes fall and Halloween. It's not just about ghost and goblins but hay rides too. All the excitement of trying to be scary and picking out the right costume has the children squirming. Parents, trying to keep the child's magic world alive, try to be scary but not too scary and give the little ones nightmares (a thin line to walk). And those are just the ones that everybody knows. Each community has them as well as does each family. It is all a parents' way of creating a magical little world, even something small. Some children in the country grew up thinking the yellow lines on the side of the road keep the grass from growing into the road. There are stories in the Bayou about what lives in the swamp. In the end the folks that see Big Foot and UFO's probably kept a little of that childhood world alive.
So all and all, Santa leads the way for all of us back to our childhood. That's why we love being the man behind the curtain (Wizard of Oz).
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