Dear Santa Claus | Alessandro D’Avenia

Dear Santa, I’m writing to apologize.

As a child I never believed in your existence because I always knew that the gifts were brought by Mom and Dad. Today, however, I want to make up for lost time: at 43 I discovered that you exist. Better late than never.

I am not talking about consumerist escapes of the imagination (that’s why Amazon is there) but about the vital imagination, that faculty that allows us not to settle for reality as it is, that source from which the possible flows and therefore the art of history . And you too. Why should I believe more in the existence of Ulysses, Romeo and Anna Karenina and less in yours? The characters in the great stories are narrative hypotheses with which we make reality speak when it seems to have changed, that is absurd.

In fact, the absurd comes from the deaf and the imagination of the hearing aid that gives us back the song of things allows us to be touched again.

For this, dear Santa Claus, we need you. If you weren’t there, how could we believe that life is a surprise? Is that desire the fire of existence and that imagination the fuel? Without imagination, how can you wish? And without wishes, how can you be alive?

If those gifts of yours did not appear at least once a year, mysteriously, what would become of that child that we were, when we had faith in the world and in life, and we had not yet begun to hide behind the various masks and armor that despite ourselves? Are we obliged to carry on in life, so as not to hurt ourselves too much?

That child had clear and essential desires: he wanted to love and be loved, he did not have to do anything more than be to exist, then – Pirandello would say – he began to exist without more, forgetting that happiness is to guard that piece of soul that only God knows . . That is why the only children, said Christ, enter the kingdom of heaven, because children can only and know how to receive, as is done with gifts. That is why you are a father, a father: one who gives life in the form of packages under the tree. To your being a father the adjective of birth is added: natal. And gifts are a surprise because we do not forget that each life is a surprise, something never seen before: real, that is, worthy of the birth of a king.

That is why perhaps we should dismantle the version of the story according to which you bring gifts only to those who behave well, because at Christmas it does not matter who and how you are, but that you are there: you are real (for a game of our real language it is also says real.). The evil you have done is forgotten and you deserve a gift, because at Christmas, thank God, you are always born again: you don’t deserve it, it just happens.

And then you live in the frozen wastelands of the north and no one knows how you manage to deliver gifts to everyone in one night, with the help of reindeer and elves. In short, everything about you is so well made up that it can only be real.

So now that I believe in your existence, I would like to make some requests of you.

Give us imagination again, that ability to see what things lack to find their fullness, so that we can take care of them: a gardener, looking at a seed, imagines the rose; a teacher, looking at the student, imagines the man. Without this imagination, a prophetic and loving gaze on things, we just don’t know how to take care of them.

Then I would like you to give us back the feeling of surprise, because we remember that the people around us, no matter how much they have defects and limitations, are still a surprise, and if we lose them at some point, then we will regret them, because they were also, but not just its flaws or limitations …

So I would like you to give us the feeling of mystery again, which allows us to find the new in everything, even in the most common. We have substituted the new for the recent, which for the new only for a moment and by accumulation, instead the new is what, while remaining the same, always gives something to each encounter, because it is inexhaustible: a love, a book , a place …

Finally, dear Santa Claus, I would like you to return to me and to those who have lost the child who writes to you, the child forgotten along the way, between defeats, compromises and lies. Give me the strength and courage to be that child because only he can receive life as a gift and therefore be happy. But perhaps, if I write to you, you have already fulfilled this wish, because writing listen to the wish and make it possible. And what is life but desire? And the desire if not imagination? And the imagination if not the love that takes care of the world when we see it hurt or simply still unfinished?

Sorry if I asked you too many questions, but so did the children. Luckily you exist, Santa Claus. Now that I am a child, yes I am big …