I’ve been working on my portfolio for Writing from Life—that final assignment that has to be finished in under a fortnight—and it’s made me think about childhood and the ways we perceive the world. As I drove to campus today I thought about little Josh and Beth and how strange it is to be telling them stories about Santa that we know to be untrue. They are both getting to that age where they can share the belief together and where Phil and CJ will get to enjoy watching that belief at work. What a strange thing childhood is. Part of me rebels against lying to my niece and nephew, while most of me wants them to share in the magic of the lies. Perhaps “lie” is the wrong word. I can’t figure it out.

As children we accept our parents’ stories as truth unquestioned, naively looking at the world through their lenses until deception is revealed. Maybe that’s a cynical view of childhood, but I’ve been thinking about my parents’ stories about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and wondering why our society condones, even promotes, lying to our children, telling them tales only to break the spell and plunge them even further into that moment of realisation that your parents aren’t always right: that separation from parental protection, from a place of safety and comfort.

But I say that and I know that it’s not what I believe. My childhood was made up of fictions: the stories my Nanna told me about her past; Fairy Lightfoot in the lilac tree; the phone call from Santa at school when I won the ‘design a sleigh’ competition and leaving my ‘sleigh certificate’ out at Christmas so Santa would recognise me; the half-eaten carrot and pastry crumbs on Christmas morning, soot on the carpet; the belief that my cuddly toys had conversations while I, sleeping, drifted away on a ship-bed from an R. L .Stevenson poem (from A Children’s Garden of Verses). These are good memories. The truth doesn’t hurt your pride because of the deception; it hurts because it marks the end of the myth. I was so scared that all the things I believed in were false when one truth was revealed, afraid that the God I had talked to at night was a myth just like the Santa Claus I had written letters to every year. Perhaps I had conflated the two. Perhaps the stories are dangerous that way. You can’t carry on believing when the truth is revealed.

Or can you? My parents still tell the same stories to their grandchildren, and in my Dad’s conviction at hearing Santa’s sleigh bells as a child I read a tinge of belief, not because he hangs onto that original naïve moment, but because of years of telling a convincing tale. I called my mother a few weeks ago to ask her a few questions about Fairy Lightfoot for a piece I was writing for the Writing from Life seminar, and after re-telling the old stories she automatically finished with: “I don’t know exactly which tree she lives in now”. What is more true – the fiction that makes you feel alive, or the truth which ruins the fun? Perhaps that’s why I love Disney World: what’s better than a world full of children who believe in the magic and adults who believe in the children’s beliefs to such an extent that their pretence rubs off on that tiny place that wants to believe in it all.

I’m going to MS in two weeks and will have to resist the urge to drive down to FL. I can’t afford Disney tickets or a hotel :-( How about this for a plan: finish Master’s degree, get job at Disney world, write children’s books about magic and fairies. A fairy tale (untruth) in itself, of course.