Personal Narrative: Santa Claus

At six years old, I believed in magic. I believed in Atlantis. I even believed in the Tooth Fairy. I would wake up in the middle of the night convinced that I would finally catch the Tooth Fairy. However, all I would ever find was a dollar hidden under my pillow. Out of all the things I believed in, I believed in Santa Claus the most. However, on one fateful Christmas Eve, my beliefs were shattered. As my father and I were driving home from Pizza Hut, I kept telling him to drive faster so I could get home in time to see Santa Claus. He then told me five words that completely changed my life: Santa Claus is not real. I was shocked. Everything that I believed in seemed to come crashing down. What else was not true? I felt like I took the red pill and awoke from The Matrix. This one event transformed me from a naive, gullible kid to a skeptic. I lost my sense of magic.
Since that fateful day, I questioned absolutely everything.
As other first graders absorbed and praised the words of their teachers, I questioned them. I became that kid that talked too much and asked too many questions. I did not understand how everyone accepted all the facts that they were given. Students were told that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees and they just accepted it. No one asked what evidence there is to support this fact or even considered the possibility it could be incorrect. They just accepted it. I believe just accepting things without even thinking about them is perhaps one of the worst things that can be done in the pursuit of knowledge. If I said that I saw a zombie, everyone would question it. However, if I instead said that penguins live in Antarctica, everyone would accept it. Even though the vast majority of them never have been to Antarctica to see penguins but rather have been told that this is the case so it must be
so.

Eventually, as I got older, my sense of magic returned because of the lack of answers I received to many of the questions I asked. Now when I say magic, I am not talking about goblins and unicorns, but rather the seemingly perfect nature of the universe. For example, the Earth is the exact distance from the sun required to support life. In addition, there is a perfect amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to make earth the right temperature to support life. Everything seems to be perfect. The probability of even one of these events happening is rare, yet many of these events happen and work together to make the world as we know it. True magic is what is unknown. 1000 years ago, the fact that you would be able to talk to anyone around the world by just entering numbers into a device would be magic. Similarly, these amazing “coincidences” that happen to make the world that we know are also considered magic. Real magic is finding beauty in the unknown. You should question why things happen, but you should also enjoy them.

Many of us do not consider these little perfect things that just happen. For instance, when a baby is born, millions of things have to go right. The DNA has to be processed and interpreted correctly, and if even one letter is off the baby can end up dead or with a disorder. Yet, most of the time, things do work out perfectly. Me, just sitting here writing to you, is an amazing task. I am thinking of words and transmitting them onto a screen for the whole world to see. Yet, despite the fact that these amazing feats occur, we do not think about them when we are exposed to them everyday. For example, if I won the lottery tomorrow, everyone would be impressed. However, If I won the lottery 200 times in a row and win it again the next day, everyone is less impressed even though it is still an impressive achievement because they expected me to win again. The magic of winning the lottery is lost due to fact that is happens again and again. Regardless of repetition, it is still an amazing accomplishment. At 18 years old, even after learning that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy do not exist, I still believe in magic.