Georgia and her best buddy Baxter are champions of magical thinking. They have imaginations that exhaust adults and astound children. Georgia falls in and out of Fairyland, which is just past Bury-land, where everything wonderful has been hidden underground, and Baxter has been to Atlantis with Aquaman many times. And this year for Christmas they are both convinced that they are going to get real, working magic wands from Santa. That idea fills a lot of their conversation.

“When I get my wand I am going to make all the cars stop polluting and every person be able to fly with flying shoes on!”

"…and every vegetable will taste like Slurpees!”

"…and all the bad guys will get put in jail right away!”

"…and I’ll make a force field around all the animals so they don’t get killed by hunters for their meat!”

I played PETA’s advocate, “But you two like meat, are you not going to eat meat when you have your wands?

Georgia rolled her eyes, “No, no, no, you don’t understand, we will only eat meat that’s already dead.”

I shuddered at the thought of road kill.

I usually just let them go off on their fantasies, every once in a while injecting a few innocent questions—“I wonder why no other kid has ever got a wand and magic before? That seems like something lots of kids would ask for.”—designed to instill a shred of doubt at Santa’s ability to accomplish such a feat so they won’t be completely deflated come Christmas morning. But today they came to a confusion that seeded the doubt without me. They clattered into the kitchen, and simultaneously shouted,

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! We found a trap door! Can we open it?"
“Belinda! Belinda! Belinda! We found a trap door! Can we open it?”

I knew what it was; there is an unused hot tub in the unused back deck, and the trap door leads to the motor and filter and boring stuff like that. But I warned them about the creepier possibilities I was hoping against, “Now sometimes animals go to sheltered places to die, so there could be animal bones in here…”

I pulled open the hatch and Georgia said, “A skull!” It was just some broken rock, but it looked very much like a cat skull. “Oh, poor kitty, when I get my wand I am going to make a coffin for all the bones and put them all in the coffin so they can be happy while they are dead, and if any animals are going in there to die I am going to use my wand and let them go into a cozy coffin so they can die in peace.”

“Why don’t you just use your wand and make them come alive again?” Baxter wondered.

Georgia got very serious and sad, she’d thought about this a lot, “Oh, Baxter, that can’t happen. There are some things that magic can’t do, and it can’t make dead things alive again. Everything has a lifetime, and there’s nothing you can do when a lifetime is over, so that’s why I want to make the animals that are dying feel cozy when their lifetime is over.”

The six-year-old advocates for end-of-life care.

Baxter wasn’t giving up, “But you said we’d be able to make Elvis come alive again for Elvismas!”

Georgia tried to work out the logic. “Well… sometimes someone can come alive but only for the time of Elvismas, not forever.”

“But,” Baxter wanted this to work, “if they can be alive for a little while, why can’t they stay alive?”

The magic was breaking down. I decided to save the day.

“Who wants juice popsicles?”

And the subject was changed.

Photo credit: byaka-buka