Do you believe in magic?

It’s that time of year when parents are talking about Santa: should their kids know the truth? Or what if their kids find out the truth? And then what happens to Christmas once the fantasy is gone?

I’ve heard more than one person speak about how there wasn’t any magic in Christmas for them after they found out that Santa didn’t exist. When they imagined Santa, there was fantasy and imagination and wonder, but life since then had been drab, uninspired and “real”. Which, if you think about it in one sense, is kind of funny given that it’s often a child’s first taste of “do this, so you get this” - which is not so magical at all!

But I think what children tap into as magical, is that they have some hope, and maybe power, to bring joy into their life; through the wonder of a jolly man flying through the sky with his reindeer, achieving impossible feats of distance and time and omnipresence, ultimately bringing them the things that they most want.

Interestingly, my parents never pretended that our presents came from Santa Claus. Our presents were always clearly from them, and Santa was most definitely a storybook character. But I don’t remember feeling any less joyful for receiving presents from my parents, and funnily enough, my siblings and I would still do all the things like leave cookies and milk out for Santa. We enjoyed the music, the decorations, the food and the gifts, and there was no diminishment of that as we got older, because there was no other truth. It was magical, because it felt like love, joy and connection. Even in bleak years, like the year my father died shortly after Christmas, there was a glimmer of hope and beauty; something to help with the pain.

As an artist, I feel like one of the purposes of art is to help us to tap into that same magic; to feel inspired, to feel wonder and awe - to feel our humanness and our connections with one another, and the spirit that connects all of us. And as a lighting artist, I find Christmas one of the most magical times, and that ability to connect through art is all around us.

Yet when I studied lighting, it was common for Christmas lights to be denigrated and sneered at, for them to be seen as “less than”. I also heard the feedback, more than once, that something I’d created made people feel happy, but they didn’t like it.

Maybe the challenge with Christmas and Santa isn’t really about whether it’s true or not, but whether we allow ourselves to feel the magic and to believe in it. Can we see the sparkle of Christmas lights, and allow ourselves to feel happiness rise up, without judging the experience? Can we allow it to lift us up, even if it’s just for a moment, even if everything else around you feels dark and hopeless? Can you believe in magic?