I believe in Santa Claus. And I believe it is my belief in him that makes him real.
When my daughters, Chloe and Ella, were young, they believed in him as an actual living, breathing entity, as I did when I was a kid. As we grew up, my daughters and I, we came to believe in him as something that is true in our hearts.
In other words, our belief in Santa Claus is not in a logical truth. Logical truths are those things that are strictly true in our heads. They can be proven scientifically. Believing in Santa is a feeling thing, something completely human that taps into the profound. Again, this is something that’s true in our hearts, the same place our intuition resides.
Each Christmas Eve when the girls were kids, we’d track Santa on the NORAD Tracks Santa website. As an adult, the fact that NORAD, the organization that monitors the airspace above the United States and Canada for safety purposes, associates itself with Santa Claus touched me. Still does, actually.
To really understand a logical or “head” truth, just consider the purpose of NORAD for a minute and all the scientific reality that goes with it. I long imagined the person (or people) who conceptualized the NORAD tracks Santa concept. Was it a bored engineer who recognized his (or her) connection to childhood, their “heart” truth, was slipping away?
It turns out there is quite a story to how the whole thing got started, some of it legend (true to the heart) and some of it fact (true to the head).
That my kids would get so excited to watch Santa moving around the world tapped into something deep within me that believes in the wonder of childhood and wanting to keep it sacred.
A piece of advice I’ve long given parents is to help their children hold onto their childhoods as long as they can. In other words, parents, I encourage you to resist any urges, from your children and those you sometimes feel, to have your kids grow up too fast.
Now picture my two young daughters and me on Christmas Eve. Each hour, amidst the dinner preparations and excitement of arriving family, we’d reload the NORAD site to see where Santa has visited. And picture their excitement in going to bed, knowing that Santa is approaching our home, knowing that in the morning they will discover the presents he has left them.
NORAD and Santa together is the perfect blend of a head truth uniting with a heart truth. I’m interested in recognizing other such combinations. I’ve read that the way you can tell if you’re well-matched with a life partner is by confirming your love is both logical and emotional, that you’ll get into trouble down the line when it’s just one or the other, or a huge imbalance.
Can you think of some other combinations of head and heart truths? I think it might be most engaging to start with the emotional truth of something, like a child’s wonder for Santa Claus, and then seeing if you can connect it to some kind of logical truth, like NORAD.
So after reading this, where do you now stand on the question? Do you believe in Santa Claus?
Andy Smallman 