There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Hamlet to Horatio
One of these is the issue of Father Christmas.
The argument is basically this: let us stop allowing our children to believe in this jolly, fat hail-fellow-well-met who orbits the earth in an impossibly short period of time covering lounge floors with a ludicrous array of gifts. It is a lie so stop perpetuating it, is how the argument seems to go. Before I state my case I do want to confess that I am a Christmas romantic: I love the good cheer of the season, my hopeless yearly attempt at crafting a fit-for-consumption eggnog, my almost hysterical defence of how good eggnog can taste even though the egg is raw (and even though my wife who always ends up making it actually cooks the egg first), the Christmas movies we pull out and make our best, most long-suffering friends watch with us every year, (While You were Sleeping being top of the pile and no, if you did not enjoy it the first time around, it probably won’t be better on the thirteenth viewing). So I love the season. Generally I love it all the way up to Christmas Day which always strikes me as being like that movie which becomes the victim of far too much positive press leading to its release on the 25th.
So yes, I’m a Christmas romantic. I also happen to think that Father Christmas has his place. Some of my most magical moments as a child were remembering Santa Claus coming by. I remember, living in Discovery on the West Rand, staring out my window and seeing the outside light and believing completely that this was absolutely Father Christmas visiting, saying my goodnights swiftly and making my way off to bed; I could not have been more charged with excitement and expectation. (And for some reason I failed to notice that the outside light was shining no brighter than it did the other 364 days of the year.)
Then one day I stopped believing. I don’t know when exactly but just one day it all became a little too far-fetched. Some children joked about it at school, slightly mocking those who still held to this lamest-of-all belief systems and I seem to remember nodding my head, furrowing my brow and agreeing in a moment that this probably was not true, though still hoping it would not influence my yearly haul of well-earned loot and so continued to kick a ball against the schoolyard fence. (I’m not actually sure I was doing that at the time but in all likelihood I was doing something with a spherical object, noting that about 90% of my waking hours was spent doing that or dreaming of doing that.) A friend’s son remarked, when speaking about the gentle awakening to the myth of Santa Claus, ‘That is the same time as you start receiving clothing for Christmas.’ Touche. The point is I believed and it was wonderful and then I didn’t and it was okay. And, it was natural. It happened in its good time.
And come to think of it this comes to pass for everyone. I don’t know anybody my age still walking around believing in Santa Claus, no thirteen year old drawing mom aside saying, ‘You know I stopped believing a while ago, but who is going to break the news to dad?’
I see parents necessarily and continuously considering what it means to protect their children - Should I let my child do this? Should my teenager be allowed to do that? There is no single textbook that lays this stuff out and even in households I see parents handling things differently depending in equal measure on their own set of principles and on the nature of the child concerned – let’s be honest, homes with more than one child are not dissimilar to the Wild West and like those cowboys most parents are shuffling backwards and shooting from the hip a lot of the time. It’s messy and so is life and that is okay.
But while parents are trying to protect could I argue strongly that there is a part of a child that needs to be protected almost above everything else: that is, their rich inner world, their vast imagination that allows them to make something absolutely fantastical out of the smallest most mundane object – a piece of board becomes a ship at sea, a cut-out box becomes a space helmet; being a child means occupying that beautiful space where worlds are created and destroyed and re-made all in the space of a quiet afternoon. A place where the improbable becomes real and the impossible not even touching the outer limits of the conceivable. And yes, a chubby guy with a worryingly red nose can bring good cheer.
Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while 1imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Could it be that wisdom dispensed is as much about timing as it is about our supposed truth?
We need imagination. We need the dreamers. We need little people to remind us that it is okay to set aside our carefully crafted doctrinal positions, our often rickety life-philosophies that we as adults have been known to guard with greater stringency than we applied in forming them in the first place. That beyond all that is a world of possibility. The imagination can serve to remind us that all we do not know can be a rich source of life for us.
If this world is to become better it will take people who can dream of something better than what is around us, who will see the impossible being made possible and we need to protect the child-imagination for although the content of the dream can and will change the capacity to dream itself, well, to lose that would be devastating.
Like most of us I worry about our world. I worry about where we are going and the bankruptcy of vision in leaders all around. I believe though that new leaders, great leaders are already born, some of them are very young still but they are already singing songs and putting out milk and going to bed early and they will be dreaming of a world of possibility.
And we are all richer for it.
