By Angela Williams Glenn 
Watching our small children rejoice in the magic of Christmas brings that magical feeling back to our own hearts. But time is so fast, and before I knew it, one by one my children were no longer believing, and I was afraid they would take the magic of Christmas with them. And they did. Just not in the way I initially worried they would.
The magic started slipping away when they started asking whether Santa was real. As the years pass by, we notice other things (like school) don’t hold the same youthful joy they once did. Our children started to worry more about the craziness of the world that exists outside their little bubble. The magic of their childhood slips through our fingers, and it feels impossible to bring it back.
I keep reaching out to snatch them back to the innocence of childhood, but I’m grasping at thin air as they rush headlong into their late teen years with adulthood lurking just around the corner.
But just when I thought the magic of Christmas was fleeting as two of my three became too old to believe, I was reminded how the magic is us. I watched my older two daughters take on being the magic for their little brother. They played the
elf for weeks for him. One would go to bed with him to hopefully keep him in his room and to go to sleep because she knew Santa’s elf had work to do.
While one sister lay with him, the other performed her elf duty, leaving him notes and
telling us Santas to make sure we ate her brother’s gingerbread cookie so his feelings
wouldn’t be hurt in the morning.
This holiday season I was reminded that the magic was in them being the magic for him. Isn’t that what we all want as parents? That we do something for years for our kids and just when we aren’t sure what our kids got out of it, they step into our shoes and pay it forward in bigger ways than we did. That’s the magic of the holidays.
But I would remind my children and all those children slipping away from the magic of childhood that as they start to question the magic of this crazy world we live in to remember there is always magic.
The magic is in them and the good deeds they will do for others. It’s in the good deeds they’ll see others do. The magic is in our hope that happiness is ours to have if we
choose to see it in the positivity rather than the negativity of our lives and our world. The magic is there—in living and celebrating life with the ones we love. We ourselves are the magic, and I hope our children never forget that when it starts to feel like the world has lost its magic.
by Leslie Means 
by Kelli Bachara 
by Krista Ward 
