The other day, I was shoveling snow when a little girl I did not know came out of a house nearby. She looked to be about 5 or 6 years old.

“Hi,” I said. “No school today?”

“No, it snowed too much,” she said with a smile that lit up her face.

“You getting ready for Christmas?” I asked while I broomed the snow off the roof of my car.

“Yup,” she said, with an even bigger smile. She turned and looked up at the top of her house. “I don’t see a chimney like the one we had in the last house. Do you think Santa will come here?”

“Yes, he will,” I said with a high degree of certainty in my voice. “Santa comes to every child’s house.”

Here’s the kicker. I told her the truth.

We are born with imaginations. I had an invisible friend I named Gunchy Fizzlegoop who went everywhere with me. We would talk about what we wanted to do each day. Sometimes, I would get on my knees on the living room rug and play baseball games with him. I had a 3-inch long, wooden bat and a Scotch- taped baseball made from a rolled-up piece of paper. Gunchy would play announcer and call each hit and each catch depending upon where I hit the ball into different areas of the room. The batters, the runners, and the fielders were invisible, but they were very real to the action of the game.

When I was a little older, my friends and I played baseball in the street and if we didn’t have enough kids to fill the bases, we’d shout, “One out. Invisible men on second and third!”

When I taught high school and it was this time of year, I would read story about a young girl named Virginia who was at that age when her friends told her that there is no Santa Claus. He’s just somebody made up by your parents who brings gifts if you’re a good girl.

That same day, I received a call from a parent who was upset with my telling the story. “We told our daughter when she was 3 years old that Santa Claus is fake and so are his reindeer,” she said. “We don’t lie to her like other parents do with their children. I don’t understand nor do I appreciate why you wasted valuable educational time with telling them a story that is nothing but nonsense.” She was in no mood for me to stand my ground about why Santa Claus is as real as the phone that she was talking to me on.

Many people believe in ghosts or aliens they have never seen. Millions of people believe in a god they have never seen. Millions more believe that love is real, but it’s not something tangible that you can hold in your hand or see with your eyes.

So why not Santa?

What lives inside our hearts and in our minds does not often have physical existence in the world we live in. I might imagine an orange dragon. You tell me it can’t be real. Then I ask you to prove to me that there are no fairies dancing on the snow in my backyard just because we cannot see them. An invisible God gives us the ability to think of many things that are also invisible, but you say an invisible God is real and lives in an invisible heaven, but Santa Claus is not real and he doesn’t live in the North Pole.

“He’s only in your imagination,” someone might say.

I’d say, “But my imagination is real.”

Every useful invention has been created from an idea that emerged from someone’s imagination. Try living in a world where nothing was real unless we could see it and touch it. There would be no God, no heaven and no miracles. Imagine how mundane and boring life would be if our minds had no ability to create a purple dinosaur, a flying turtle, an Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, himself.

Writer Charles Bukowski wrote, “The problem is we look for someone to grow old with while the secret is to find someone we can stay a child with.” It might be true that many young children are happier than adults because what kids imagine that is real to them, is not supposed to be real to us. A little girl’s doll tells her out loud what flavor ice cream to choose, we smile and love the child’s creative spirit. If that same girl at 30 years old listens to a talking doll, we’d say she needs a psychiatrist.

Yet, if you or I pray out loud to an invisible God, are we crazy, too? If I should say there is a ghost in my house, wouldn’t millions of people believe it to be possible?

Virginia’s father avoided her question about Santa and told her to write a letter to the editor of a newspaper and ask him because he only prints facts. The editor gave her letter to an associate who threw it away until one night, he retrieved the letter and replied,

“Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus!” So is love real when we feel it in our hearts. What we often imagine is more real than anything we experience through our senses.

If the child that lives inside me believes there are fairies dancing on the fallen snow, then they are unquestionably there. My imagination is as real as the computer I am using to write this column.

And on this Christmas Eve, I will glance into the night sky for Santa’s reindeer flashing across the rooftops. They will be as real as the bearded wonder who sits on their sleigh and brings such great delight to the season of Christmas.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com