Solstice 2018: Just Maybe

I've been thinking a lot lately about a friend's Facebook post that urged parents make the crappy Christmas presents start coming from Santa at Christmas, and the expensive ones come from known humans.  The idea was to spare the kids who don't get their every wish fulfilled at Christmas from thinking that Santa discriminates too. It's a good point.  It's a perspective I hadn't thought about before.  But I should have.

This, of course, begs the question of why anyone really perpetuates the Santa myth with children, anyway. And I digress . . .

I'm not one who should really talk because I allowed the Santa myth to take hold after friends who view Santa as The Harmless Imperative thoroughly indoctrinated my three year old.  I figured he'd grow out of it.  And he will.  I just didn't realize how long it might take.  This year, at nearly eight, he once again wrote Santa a letter.  The letter explained his very specific request and included the address where he and his cousin will be spending Christmas so Santa will know where to deliver the goods.  After neatly addressing the letter to the North Pole, he turned to me and informed me that he would be watching my bank account this Christmas. 

"Why?" I inquired. 

"Because I need to see if your balance goes down at all around Christmas.  If it does, then I'll know you and dad are really the ones buying me presents and there isn't a Santa."  That was my opening, but I just couldn't.

"Okay.  But if you watch my bank balance how will you know whether I bought food or I bought you a present?," I asked.  Without missing a beat, he looked me right in the eye and said, "I'll know."

I think he already knows. 

I had my shot, but I couldn't burst his bubble.  Maybe I just didn't want him to be disappointed.  More likely, it was my love and attraction to myth that made me keep my mouth shut.  I didn't want to steal his.

Myth is so powerful and captivating.  It offers us the stories of our origins and our better selves and provides ordering principles and metaphor.  Myths -- our own stories that we retell beyond their truths, or the stories we are given -- are how we connect between here and there.  They're how we connect with each other.  We know they aren't true.  But then again, they are.

Likely it's the deepness of the dark, but I find the period around the Winter Solstice powerful with myth.  Narratives of the value of dormancy.  Stories that promise an awakening to come.  They float in my head.  I write them for myself depending what I need.

Solstice is a bit like that small moment at the top of your breath when you pause for just a heartbeat before the exhale.  I think there's magic in this small moment.

Just maybe.