G.K. CHESTERTON BELIEVED IN SANTA CLAUS:

He wants the child “to have some harmless borderland of fancy in childhood, which is still a part of the land in which he will live.” He wants the child to “pass from a child’s natural fancy to a man’s normal faith in Holy Nicholas of the Children.”

For Chesterton, that “harmless borderland” includes Santa Claus. I think that’s more problematic than he saw. But whatever it includes, we need to find it. It is the place children see what we need to see, where they find joys in the world that point to the eternal joys.

He suggests the reason in his book on the painter and poet William Blake, one of his earliest books. The “spiritualist,” the man who pursues spirits because they’re spirits, “has to know his gods before he loves them. But a man ought to love his gods before he is sure that there are any. … If we do not delight in Santa Claus even as a fancy, how can we expect to be happy even if we find that he is a fact?”

What as a child we saw dimly, in natural fantasies, we should see as an adult. We must not go blind by giving it up, as atheists do, but grow up by seeing it clearly. To put in biblical terms: we must become as little children as part of growing into the full stature of Christ.

Read the whole thing.