Santa Claus and the miracle of travel

I forgot that kids are kids and think of them as short adults. This is good because it means that I treat with them seriousness and respect, and try to get to know them and their interests. But I tend to forget how small their world is and how little they know - and how significant my words and presence can be in their lives. George Orwell reminds me that, "A child may be a mass of egoism and rebelliousness, but it has no accumulated experience to give it confidence in its own judgements. On the whole it will accept what it is told, and it will believe in the most fantastic way in the knowledge and powers of the adults surrounding it."1 He goes on to tell the story of illicitly buying some sweets as a child and, on coming out of the shop, seeing a man looking his way whom he earnestly believed was a spy placed there by his boarding school headmaster.

He also talks about how adults can abuse childish ignorance, and explains that being caned for wetting the bed taught him that his behaviour was both wicked and outside his control. "I was crying . . . partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desperate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them."2

May God help us to treat kids well.


1 G Orwell, "Such, Such Were the Joys" in Books v. Cigarettes (London: Penguin Books, first published 1952, here 2008), 83.
2 Ibid, 69-70.