Fairy Tales

I will raise my children to believe in fairy tales, not in Santa Claus, baby-delivering storks, or leprechauns, but in Peter Pan. Now S.C., that funny, lost stork from Dumbo, and little Irish men with red hair and pots of gold are well and good, and my children will know and love them. But they will believe in Peter Pan. My reasons:
When a child believes in these pixies, it is only for a few brief years, then they go through extreme emotional trauma as they discover that their parents lied and deceived them, that no one lives at the North Pole, that babies are not found at the doorstep wrapped in soft blankets, and that you can never reach the end of the rainbow. If they are healthy children, and they will be because they believe in Peter Pan, they will search for the end of the rainbow, but they will not truly believe that there is a pot of gold hidden there. My children will know that the magic is not in the pot of gold, but in the rainbow; magic is not in Santa but the bright colours, red and green and gold, on the wrapping papers; magic is not in the storks, but in the babies.
But Peter Pan is the magic. To me, Peter is not the pixie he appears in Walt Disney's animated movie. To me, he is a little boy, with a little boy's vanities, who stopped growing just as he started growing. I see him as a boy with blond hair, eyes that are older than his body, and wise with the magic that is in him, slender and quick, but with that little sag in his stomach that small boys have before they learn to hold it in. Not a flirt, but just a boy, who really doesn't care about girls, and though Wendy and Tiger Lily and Tinkerbell think they must compete for his affections, he only sees them as playmates he must be more careful with.
"The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread, upon one thread." That thread is the vanity of Peter Pan. As long as Peter never grows up, even when you are grown up, fairyland is still open. But if once Peter stays too long in our world, listening to stories about himself at the window of the next Wendy, and grows up, then fairyland will shatter beyond all hope of repair, for we will have lost our guide to fairyland.