The Santa Cause Repost

For the holidays, Netflix is streaming Miracle on 34th Street with Edmund and Natalie.

With the recent brouhaha over kids being told by a teacher that there is no Santa, it felt OK to repost what I wrote last year around this time on my Cranial Gunk blog.

For the record, I believe in Santa Claus. Not the jolly red-suited man who breaks into homes to leave gifts instead of taking, but the spirit of giving that he represents to children and adults like me.

Two of my favorite holiday movies are Miracle on 34th Street and Bass and Rankin’s The Year Without a Santa Claus because they address questions of belief and faith. Not the religious interpretations of the words but the parental version: What we tell our children they are too old to do and believe in anymore.

My mother – Yes, my Tiger Mother -- once said to me with a sigh: “Don’t make the children grow up too fast.” I made a remark about her coddling my children too much. (A post of Tiger GrandMothers is coming).

Her comment reminded me of a chapter from the child development textbook I used at Bank Street. The chapter described how different cultures and societies had different expectations of their children throughout the process to maturity (from activities as fundamental as when children are expected to walk to when they are considered contributing members of society).

What the chapter didn’t address was imagination. When do other cultures expect their children to “grow up” and tether their imaginations? Is the imagination something other cultures indulge in?

One of my favorite scenes from Miracle on 34th Street is when Edmund Gwenn (Kris Kringle) teaches Natalie Wood (Susan Walker) how to imagine she is a monkey. It’s Susan’s desperate need to interpret the world beyond the realm of the seeable and concrete that is the catalyst for the Miracle story.

Not streaming on Netflix yet, though I wish it would. It’s among my kids and my favorite holiday movies.

In The Year Without a Santa Claus, Santa (Mickey Rooney) is the one who succumbs to the “real world.” After a visit from the doctor, he decides he needs a break from delivering presents panning the decision as: “Nobody really cares anymore.”

There is also a child who is “too grown up” to believe in Santa Claus in this story. His name is Ignatius Thistlewhite and he dismisses Santa as something for the “little kids.” However, he quickly changes his mind when he learns his father still believes. The story continues with Ignatius as Santa’s most enthused advocate.

The imagination is a very powerful resource. Like the song says: “ Imagine all the people sharing all the world.” It is a skill and like any other skill. It requires effort and practice in order to gain proficiency.

The Wright Brothers are a testament to the power of the imagination. They, “working essentially alone and with little formal scientific training,” imagined the possibility of flight and solved a problem that so called experts in their day could not.

This holiday – more so than the past two – it is important to nurture your imagination. The still poor economy has taken its toll on many people’s spirits and fostered among some a self-destructive cynicism. While it is easier said than done, a stab at imagining a solution to current problems must be attempted.

This holiday, Church’s words seem much more meaningful:

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

hope

I still remember election night 1992, my first presidential election. I was 18 years old and a first-year in college, away from home for the first time. Ronald Reagan was the first president I and my classmates could remember, and we had spent almost all of our childhoods under Republican administrations. Now, finally, we were ready and able to voice our opinions, to make a change, to usher in a new era—to vote. I remember walking the halls of my dorm until late at night, the lights on in every room, televisions tuned to the news in every lounge and common room, large groups of 18-year-olds bursting with energy and excitement glued to the incoming results. I can still remember running from room to room, giddy with the feeling that not only were things going to change, but that we had made them change, listening to groups of my classmates singing choruses of “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” loudly and off-key from every lounge in the dorm.

Sixteen years later, on another election day, I am feeling all the emotions that that 18-year-old me felt, only more so. Sixteen years ago, I was just a kid, only just beginning to realize what it meant to be politically active and responsible, to be a citizen. Then, we thought in vague generalities about “the future” and “changing the world.” We were in college—that’s what we were supposed to do. Today, those phrases are so much more concrete. When I say “the future,” I am speaking my daughters’ names. When I talk of “changing the world,” I am planning out the legacy I leave them.

I remember, during college, coming across a copy of an obscure, recent memoir by a biracial lawyer in the library during one of my “multiracial studies” research jaunts, looking for stuff about people like me. When, a few years later, a classmate emailed other alums of color asking for support for a Harvard Law alum running for office, I recognized the name, and took note. When that same man took to the stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and gave voice to the unspoken hopes and desires lodged in my heart, I held my breath and dried my tears and thought, this man is going to do something. Change is coming.

When he first threw his hat into the ring for the Democratic nomination, I like many I knew, was hopeful, but still thought, no, not yet, he’s not ready, but he will be. But with every speech, and every new vision of the future, I became more convinced. It was time. If not not, when?

When I sent in my absentee ballot last week with my vote for Barack Obama for President of the United States of America, I voted not only for myself, but for all those on whose shoulders I’ve stood on, and for all those who’ve struggled and journeyed with me, and, most especially, for my daughters, and for theirs, and for all who will come after. I voted as a multiracial American yearning for a future that looks like me. I voted as a fighter for social justice who has to believe that ideas like “hope” and “change” have the power to move mountains. I voted as a father who wants his children to grow up in a world where it’s a given that they can do whatever they put their minds to, and where it’s doubly a given that to fight for what’s right is what it means to be not just an American but a human being. I’ve seen the saying all over the internet recently, and I believe it, I feel it inside: “Rosa sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Barack could run; Barack ran so our children could fly.” This is the promise, this is the legacy.

On Halloween, my first-born daughter’s birthday, we came home to find that the “No on Proposition 8” sign in our front yard had been taken down, torn in half, stuffed in a tree, and replaced with a neighbor’s stolen “Yes on 8” sign. This is the world we live in, where fear and disagreement lead to hate and human dignity is given short shrift. That is not the world I want to raise my children in. I have no illusions that, by electing Barack Obama president, the world will magically change overnight. But change is going to come. It’s already begun.

And when our second daughter is born not long after Inauguration Day, she will carry a reminder of this always, in her name. Her middle name will remind us of what we all need, and of what we all can give to each other.

Hope.



[Hat-tip to Raymond Roker for the video from Vote for Our Future which is at the top of this post.]

[Crossposted from daddy in a strange land.]