Caldecott Monday: The Polar Express

[osprey_archer]

Caldecott Monday! The Polar Express! We owned this book when I was a child, although it was only one of piles and piles of Christmas-themed picture books and not as bright or redolently red and green as some of the others, so I only read it occasionally.

I did quite like it, though - especially the description of the food on the train, "candies with nougat centers as white as snow" and "hot cocoa as thick and rich as melted chocolate bars." Gosh. That makes me want a cup of cocoa right now, never mind it's really too hot for it. In fact the whole train ride, the train slicing ghost-like through the dark woods at night, ever northward toward a city rimmed in lights...

As a child I also loved the bit about the bell that only rings as long as you believe in Santa - so magical - but I feel a bit more jaundiced about it now - the entire cultural obsession with teaching children to believe in Santa, and mourning it as a tragic end of innocence when they cease to believe, as inevitably they must? Is it kind of like getting a kid a pet so they will learn an Important Lesson about Death when it dies? Except in order to teach an Important Lesson about Disillusionment instead, and possibly an Important Lesson about Being Gullible if they keep believing long after the other children.

Possibly I'm just a curmudgeon.

I have never seen the movie version of this book. Should I remedy this? Or is the train ride north far less mystically beautiful in the movie than in my head?

Comments

[gaudior]

I feel like people want children to believe in Santa Claus very much out of their own nostalgia for how they imagine childhood to have been. It's not actually what childhood is like, because being a kid is significantly more confusing and overwhelming than that (there is so fucking much to understand, and just because children haven't yet made sense of things like death and sex and etiquette doesn't mean they're not trying). It seems like a mean trick to play on someone-- you're spending all your time and energy trying to make sense of this huge complex world, and we're going to throw off all your calculations with bad data? For fuck's sake.

The fact that kids manage it as well as they do is actually pretty impressive.

(Also, have I formally said hi yet? I friended you because you're friends with sovay, but I've been admiring your fanfic for a long time! Hope that this is okay?)

[osprey_archer]

Hello! It's always nice to see new friends. It's been interesting moving to Dreamwidth actually, because the social configurations seem slightly but nonetheless sometimes significantly different here - new people! New groups!

There's a quote in Paris to the Moon - let me go look it up - "the romance of your children's childhood may be the last romance you can give up." It's in the context of the author's move to Paris with his wife and young son, not Santa specifically, but I think the Santa thing is related: believing in Santa signifies innocence and security and snow falling softly outside the frosted windowpanes etc. etc., and people want to wish that on their children.