CHAPTER XX 



NEW YEAR'S DAY AND THE CALENDAR 



I CAME across a discussion the other day as to whether 

 it is right to tell children and to let them believe that 

 Santa Claus puts Christmas presents in their stockings, 

 and that Peter Pan really comes in at the window and 

 teaches nice little boys and girls to float through the air. 

 I was surprised that anyone should be so singularly 

 ignorant of child-nature as to hold that children really 

 believe these things. Children have a wonderful and 

 special faculty of " make-believe " which is not the same 

 as " belief." All the time when a child is indulging in 

 " make-believe " (a sort of willing self-illusion or waking 

 dream) its real, though tender, reasoning-power is merely 

 "suspended/' and is not offended or outraged. That 

 power can on emergency be brought to the front, and the 

 little one will say, " Of course, they're not real," or, " I 

 always knew he didn't really come down the chimney." 

 So that I do not think anyone need be anxious as to 

 doing harm or laying the foundations of future distrust by 

 telling fairy-tales to the very young. If told in the right 

 form and spirit they are received by six-year-old and older 

 children readily and naturally as belonging to that deli- 

 cious world of " make-believe " which (as one of their 

 own orators, I believe, has said) " children of even the 

 meanest intelligence will not be guilty of confounding 

 with that very inferior every-day world of reality in which 



