These myths are more then just pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or modify behavior. Each of the these three traditions asks a child to believe the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped up tests to build a childs faith and imagination. The first test is to believe a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: to believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money.
From a man to an animal to a fairy.
From toys to candy to money.
Thus, intrestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairydom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickles... dimes... and quarters. maybe even a lucky loonie.
In this way, a child is stepped up to even greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy and ending with the tooth fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood and ending with absolute trust in the national currency.
Talk about frustrating. All that pretense and reality flux. Some mythological fat-so drives our national economy.
A child who is never coached with Santa Claus may never develope the ability to imagine. To him, nothing exists except the literal and tangible.
A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe anything - tangible or intangible - again. To never trust or wonder.
But a child who relinquishes the illusions of Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, that child may come away with the more important skill set. That child may recognize the strength of his own imagination and faith. He will embrace the ability to create his own reality. That child becomes his own authority. He determines the nature of his world. His own vision. And by doing so, by the power of his example, he determines the reality of the other two types: those who can't imagine and those who can't trust.
If you get everyone telling the same lie, its not a lie anymore.
So whats the point of all this? Sometimes everything just seems fake to me... especially when avoiding an essay to write
I like how you write lucky loonie from the tooth fairy. I have been told by my activity day girls the apparent going rate is $5 a tooth. I am now to the point of "when I was a kid I got a quarter and that bought me enough candy to rot the rest of the teeth out".
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