Belief in Santa Claus

At Crime Reads, this post:

On December 20th, 1935, the sixty-one-year old novelist and big-time Catholic G.K. Chesterton published an open letter in The Commonweal, an English liberal Catholic magazine. His article, which ran for just two columns, was entitled “Santa Claus and Science.” It begins with a lament, a ruing that many young children fall into disillusionment following the discovery of the non-existence of Santa Claus, and it works its way to a surprising thesis statement, that Chesterton himself did veritably believe in Santa Claus. …

The natural belief that children readily possess should not be snuffed out, he posits, but encouraged and developed. He concluded his essay with the following demand: “Cannot the child pass from a child’s natural fancy to a man’s normal faith in Holy Nicholas of the Children, without enduring that bitter break and abrupt disappointment which no wmarks [sic] the passage of a child from a land of make-believe to a world of no belief?”

Here’s a link to Chesterton’s full article, and Merry Christmas!