(Can loves to make this kind of bold statements, which is in turn why I love him).
His theory goes like this: both of them are the epitome of trickery on the parents' part and of disillusion for the children who then understand that they should never trust adults.
In Turkey he said, they dress you up like a king, they even give you a scepter put you on a horse and beat the drums, it's your very special day, you are on top of the world, you think your family, the world...hell the universe loves you!!
And then...they cut your penis...and you wake up in pain and for days the thought of sitting down scares you...and you realize that your family can... and will... tell you tales.
And Can figures this can't be far from the disappointment that kids in the west must feel when they realize they've been leaving all these cookies and all these glasses of milk not for Santa Claus, but for their parents, who lied and connived in their back...
Minus the pain, the Santa Claus disillusion brings kids to the same conclusion, adults don't believe and they'll use a child's belief in an enchanted life to trick him. No wonder even adults rely to the cry of Peter Pan... who would WANT to grow up?
This is something I often run into with kids especially the 5-8 year old groups. They like stories, but they don't want to be tricked and their sense of what is really real and what is not is still shaky, so they rely on us adult to let them know what to believe...
They'll come like detectives after the show and interrogate me with serious eyebrows "Are these stories real?"...or they'll use reverse psychology: "I KNOW none of this is real!"...some, already tired of asking direct questions to receive tricky answers delivered with a grin of adult contempt, focus on the evidence, they inspect my props, a glass bottle which I claimed contained medicine to raise the dead turns out...empty! I obviously never owned the stuff...HA! Now THEY get to deliver the grin of contempt with the deadly sentence "I never even BELIEVED you had the stuff" My diamond big as your eye...a piece of glass...disappointment!
My niece once embarked on a quest to test the veracity of the Santa Claus situation which my sister insisted DID exist (for the sake of her little sister really) while quite a few of her first grade friends claimed it was just another fib.
She knew he left presents, but come to it everyone can bring presents. What people couldn't (wouldn't!) do is take something that did NOT belong to them. So...she wrote him a letter and left it by the tree, if he took it, it would prove his existence...but still, to make sure, the letter read:
"Dear Santa, I've been wondering, do you exist?"
Oh the length they will go to test the thin line between reality and enchantment.
Now my theory is this (yes, I just LOVE theories...):
Kids live enchanted lives, and their fear comes for the fact that as adults we feed the fire of their imagination...but we don't believe a shred of this is true!
It's not that they want to leave enchantment behind, it's that they want us to either believe or at least stop pretending and then judge them for their naïveté and crack jokes about it to our friends.
I believe in fairies, I believe in magic!
Oh don't get me wrong I'm about as blasé as they come when it comes to organized religion or overly new age stuff (notice the careful placement of the adverb "overly")
I won't turn tables.
I was raised super over the top skeptical (but by hippies, on a commune, it goes something like: "religion is the opium of the masses, we don't buy any of it, because we are rational people, but we worship bees and howl to the full moon")...anyhow...
I believe that thresholds are sacred places between worlds...I believe that you can step into a grove of singing trees and hear them do a barber shop quartet number...I believe in the miracle of the seed...and that bees are goddesses to the sticky pollen which holds on like crazy to their hairy mane in the wild hope of hitting a landing area smaller than the head of a needle...I believe that each second spent no worshipping the miracles of natures is wasted...and I believe with all my heart that if I ask for it often enough I will reincarnate as an albatross of the Bosphorus so I can dry my wings in the raising run...and wind surf like a kite.
When I tell stories I gather around myself all of this wildness, I wrap myself in a shall of enchantment. So that I can enter kids' enchanted lives without bringing the adult smell of disillusion. Because kids who question, they also love to believe in the stories. How do I know? I see their faces when they are in the stories!
What they don't like is the idea that it all came from the mouth of someone who believes s/he's tricking them.
I believe in the stories I tell them, I believe they are true. And that's what I tell them.
Oh, I don't lie about it. I don't believe in their factual truth but I believe that they carry the truth.
And when told in this way, kids relax. I've told stories to a kid who entered the room issuing me the warning that he "hated stories because it was all made up and nope mam he would not buy a shred of my lies"...and I'm blessed to say that he left with magical star in his eyes...and I know that it was because we went to this other world together.
And that's how telling stories to kids is good for us adults...
it's an invitation: the practice of living enchanted lives.
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