A Sleigh Ride Home
Faith in something good, something eternal, and something beautiful
Is Santa Claus real? Come on now! Santa Claus is much, much, much more than real.
He’s true.
Real is facts and figures — degrees on the thermometer, seats on the school bus, days off for the holidays. You can’t meaningfully doubt what’s real. Or, at least, it’s dangerous to test it. Go on, try as hard as you can to be skeptical of gravity — G is not a constant! It’s bonkers! — and you still won’t fly into the stratosphere when you zoom off a ski jump.
Put it this way: people who doubt gravity don’t tend to return from their experiments to tell the tale.
Truth is something more. Truth is our whole reason for being. It’s the massive, broad force that blows the heart open. That crystal-clarity of the night sky in late December, when it’s hard to tell mental space from outer space. Truth contains powers we can’t see or measure: spontaneous generosity, weird surges of joy and love without conditions. And — most remarkably of all — truth welcomes doubt.
You know that moment when it seems absolutely not possible that you can get up with that newborn once more? Or stay awake another second to finish a midterm essay, or fall in love after a heartbreak, or do another terrifying thing with kettlebells in Crossfit? And then…you do? That’s when you’ve hit truth — that scientifically, physically, measurably impossible things can be suddenly possible.
In The Power of Habit, the writer Charles Duhigg shows how it takes two things to absolutely change a life: hard work, and faith in a great truth. Yes, faith. But that doesn’t mean Duhigg dives into the life of St. Theresa. Instead, he talks about football, and an NFL coach named Tony Dungy.
Under Coach’s instruction, his pro teams excelled at at hard work. They won games. They won and won and won, with perfect discipline. Until it came to crunch time.
You know what crunch time is: That time when it really, really counts. When your mom’s in the hospital, or you have to give a terrifying presentation, or you have to make the whole Christmas dinner in your tiny kitchen…and of course among the guests is your controlling, gluten-free sister-in-law who should be a judge on Top Chef.
Crunch time in football is playoffs. And that’s when Coach’s team kept blowing it. Under stress, when a win was crucial, they’d freak out, forget everything they knew, and revert to sloppy old habits. This is the equivalent of eating a sensible meal with your parents, getting furious about your mom’s interrogation of your girlfriend, and then sneaking down at 4am to wolf down the “leftover” pecan pie (let’s admit it was a whole second pie).
So with hard work you can have the good habits, and the commitment — but when you need purpose it’s just not there. For Coach and his team, a sense of purpose came with a tragedy. Just an ordinary tragedy, life on life’s terms. But tragedy happens to every one, in every single life, and sometimes it changes you. Coach’s young son died.
Coach fell into a stupor of sorrow, but his team begged him to come back. And after a few months of coaching and grieving, coaching and grieving, Coach noticed something new. The team was united in seeing their hero through his mourning, and memorializing his son. Suddenly they had faith. With that faith, that sense of purpose, they stuck to the plays he’d taught them, and won even the hardest games. They knew why they were doing it — for Coach, for his son’s memory and for the life that goes on.
Faith, invested in something good, something eternal, and something beautiful — that’s what builds everyday champions. The holidays, we’re often told, are “hard.” And sure they are. Maybe it’s the traffic, the expense, and the inconvenience — or maybe it’s something deeper: loneliness, expectations, family tensions, loss. But whatever upsets your heart this year, facing that difficulty — and that Scrooge-like doubt that comes back like clockwork — is an opportunity to remember your purpose. Your truth. Your faith.
Maybe you believe, as Einstein did, that the universe is fundamentally a friendly place. That a small group of good people can make a difference. That through superficial tensions the love of siblings endures. Start with that. And just for fun, because it’s the holidays, call that faith after the name of a goofy saint in red with a beard that’s a little too flowy to be a hipster beard: Santa Claus.
Santa Claus is that faith. Sure, laugh at him a little, a lot. He can take it. He’s hardy. He eats well. He has a big enough heart and a deep enough sense of humor not to fret when we doubt him. He knows that, after all the bluster and cynicism, he is still a place to rest that ancient faith that the world is good, and that magic exists.
You can feel that goodness smack in midwinter; that’s the founding discovery of the holidays in pagan times. Warmth on an icy day, a light in the window, an old friend who can be trusted with your guilty love for snow globes, stockings and weekday pancakes.
You want to doubt these comforts? You want to question faith? That’s part of it. It’s mandatory, even. And you have a hero’s journey ahead. Quest out into the arctic superstorm of life — yeah, it can be cold out there — to see what’s real for yourself. For a time, maybe traditional faith seems to belong to dopes, or children, or those without ambition.
That’s just perfect! That’s the only way you know for sure, when, tired and confused, you hit your knees in a blizzard and there’s a hand out. It seems goofy but what choice do you have? A gloved hand. A red coat. And a sleigh ride home.
The #SantaProject is a movement to keep the story of Santa Claus alive on the Internet. Join by responding with your own story about the magic of belief. To learn more about the #SantaProject, visit macys.com/believe.
