The Magic of Childhood

Like most people my age, my childhood ended when I found out Santa Claus was real.  I think it hit me harder than it hit most people I knew.  Maybe because I was the youngest of my friends.  I just wasn’t equipped to handle the harsh truth of Santa Claus and what that means.

It happened when I was six years old.  I woke up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve to hear a loud clatter rising from the rooftop.  More sounds followed: my parents shuffling from their room, scraping from the chimney, a heavy thud from the fireplace, and the muffled tone of my mother and father talking.  You’re just dreaming, I told myself. Go back to sleep.  And I would have, but then I realized mother and father’s voices were accompanied by a third.  It was deep… almost downright jolly.  I knew right away that I had to investigate.

When I climbed downstairs I could hardly believe my eyes.  My own parents, who had for years told me that they bought me all of my presents every single year, stood helping an enormous man in a red suit unload a bag full of boxes. I wasn’t upset because mother and father had lied to me. Well, maybe a little bit, but for me, the hardest part was that I finally knew we didn't live in a world governed by observable laws.

I burst into tears, and the adults turned to look. My mother gasped, my father shook his head, and Santa looked away, as if he had seen this too many times.  Mother softly tried to comfort me, but the questions I kept asking just got harder and harder for her to answer.

I suppose I was being naïve to believe that matter could neither be created nor destroyed, or that the earth orbited the sun due to the sun's greater mass and gravitational pull. But when she told me that the stories were true, even all powerful genies and the chariot that towed the sun, I cried for hours. It was childish, sure, but I just wasn't ready to learn that I could save the life of a fairy just by believing in it enough, and if it touched me I could just think happy thoughts and fly through the stars and straight on until morning.

But again, I was only six years old. Mother made me swear not to tell my brothers about Jack Frost and wood nymphs until they were old enough to find out for themselves.  It’s for their own good, she’d told me. And she was probably right.  How could a three-year-old sleep if he knew about the boogeyman or alien abductions. These things are big, and children are impressionable. So you tell a kid that a rainbow is just an illusion created by refracted sunlight to keep him from searching for gold and getting mauled by a leprechaun.

When I have kids, I'm sure I'll take great lengths to hide the magic beans that grow stalks high above the clouds to the land of giants. But their questions won’t be easy. I don't know how I'll explain thunder without telling them about the angels going bowling or lightning without worrying them about Zeus or Thor striking them down at the slightest provocation. Life would just be simpler without them having to use mirrors to check around corners for basilisks or gorgons. I wish that could be the case.

I wonder if I could use this to my advantage. If I envisioned it hard enough, who knows? I could be able to create a new world for them. A new world where the things I believed in as a child were true - conversion and conservation of energy, a light speed that nothing could surpass, a recordable cause for every effect. Maybe, just maybe, somewhere there could be a universe where life finds a way to adapt and change and pass on traits in response to natural causes rather than the inscrutable whims of  jealous and petty gods.  Somewhere out there is a world that is billions of years old instead of a mere six thousand, in a universe that can be explored and known through careful study and reason.

Heh, listen to me, I must sound like a little kid with a storybook, don't I?  Sorry, I guess all that stuff is still pretty fantastical.  Wishful thinking.  I guess I get carried away with my imagination sometimes, just wishing that the world was a little less magical.