It’s hard to escape Santa. I mean, the guy is making a list, checking it twice, and let’s be honest, keeping tabs on us all year long.
“Goodness!” as my nine-year-old son, Johnny, recently said. “That is a lot of pressure!”
Santa’s presence reminds us that December is the month of magic.
But let me ask you something, not just for this month, but every month of the year, do you still believe in magic?
And while I suspect there aren’t many nine-year-olds reading this right now, this question isn’t necessarily for them. It’s for you: the young adult, the parent, the full-fledged, card-carrying member of the “Real Adult World”.
So… do you?
Let me tell you a story about the kid who needed to know everything…
Years ago, in our early days of directing camp, we had a camper, let’s call him Augie.
Augie was not your typical eleven-year-old. He was smart, curious, and a voracious learner. Being from New York City and new to the West, he wanted to understand how everything worked. Science was his gospel. Magic didn’t stand a chance.
This posed a problem.
First, kids who debunk magic can shake a community. You probably still remember the person who once told you something magical wasn’t real. Their face is etched in your memory the way the Grinch is.
That was Augie. And he had the facts.
Second, the camp experience in America is built on magic. Camp thrives on wonder and awe. On the unexplainable. On the moments that make you gasp or laugh or go quiet.
But when magic happened, Augie didn’t take it in-he demanded to know the trick. He told me often that he did not believe in magic or coincidence. Things happened, and there usually was a way to explain them.
So he and I spent the summer talking.
“Why do you need to know?” I would ask.
“I just have to,” he’d reply.
And slowly, he softened. He stopped debunking quite so much. He let himself enjoy things a bit more without always needing to know the ‘how.’
On the final night of camp, magic showed up in full force. Wyoming delivered one of those nights you never forget: the Milky Way arcing above us, shooting stars every few moments, a quiet that wrapped the whole group in awe.
Augie sat near me and I could see him staring at the night sky. Being from New York, the brilliance of the Wyoming night sky was something he had never seen before. You could see him staring with wonder, and trying to figure it all out.
After a long stretch of silence with the other kids (an unnatural state for him) he came over to me whispered:
“Tom… I’ve pretty much figured out how you run this whole operation and how you make it all happen. But what I can’t figure out is how you made this.” He pointed to the sky. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
All he could manage was a soft, breathless: “Wow.”
I looked out at a sea of 150 kids just laying on the ground in silence looking up. ‘Ahhhs’ and ‘ooohs’ would ring out each time a shooting star crossed the sky. A moment had been created. Yes, I am aware that some of that was due to the dark nights that Wyoming is known to produce, but the feeling of wonder and awe and being together with all your camp friends in silence watching a natural wonder like that was a part of the piece that would define this magical moment.
So I took a brief moment to talk about the darkness of our sky compared to New York, but then I finished with “I think there was some magic involved, too.”
And for the first time all summer, he simply said, “Oh. I see.”
Where Did Our Magic Go?
Something about adulthood draws us away from magic. Maybe it’s our obsession with the “real”…
- the real world
- the real job
- the real consequences
- the real estate
- the real responsibilities
- the real stress
Somewhere along the way, wonder gets crowded out. Awe becomes impractical. Mystery becomes childish. Magical moments, like the one described above, become less noticed.
And what a loss that is.
At Wilderness Adventures, we actively look for staff who still believe in magic: those who can see possibility; those who haven’t let the “real” shove out the remarkable.
I’m convinced that most people need to “campify” their lives a little. One of the simplest ways is to lean back into magic. Dust off the part of your brain that once believed freely. December is a perfect time to stoke that fire.
In our home, we acknowledge magic all the time. It shows up in a shooting star, a chance meeting with an old friend in the biggest city in America, a perfect sunset, the owl that always seems to be following us, a song that arrives at exactly the right moment. It shows up in all the small, glimmering surprises of ordinary days-the moments when my kids glance at me, eyebrows raised, and I shrug knowingly.
“Magic,” they whisper.
And even as a card-carrying adult, I can honestly whisper back:
“Yep. You gotta believe.”
