When I was a little girl, the fountain in the center of town was a child’s dream. The spires of water rose up and splashed back down in all the colors of the rainbow, changing from red to green or pink in midair.

Sometimes as a family treat, my parents would pile us in the car and drive us by the “Kool-Aid Fountain.” We believed that the water was made of our favorite beverage, but we never tried to drink from it, because that would have been pushing the magic envelope.

I remember sitting on the marble rim of the fountain, listening to an adult explaining the colored water to her child. It was not magic, she said, but merely a bunch of colored lights beneath the surface which made the water appear multihued. She invited her little one to look for himself and know the truth, rather than remain in awe of something that did not exist.

The little boy looked and saw whatever was down there, and he was ready to go home. I didn’t look, and the fountain remained for me magical and miraculous until the Kool-Aid was taken away by the municipal powers-that-be.

I was 7 when I started hearing rumbles of discontent among my schoolmates. It started out as mumbles of doubt here and there, easy enough to ignore, but by the next year, the majority of my friends were all saying the same thing. They said that Santa was not real. Our parents were the ones who put the gifts beneath the Christmas trees and in our stockings. The Jolly Old Elf was made up, and only babies believed in him.

I wanted nothing to do with such heresy, and kept my peace while a growing number of classmates made plans to catch their parents in the act. Some were outraged; others were tickled at having figured things out. I wondered where the magic went when it left a child’s life. And I held onto mine.

When I was 10, I gave in and asked Mama about Santa Claus. She told me that Santa was real only as long as I believed in him and that the second I stopped believing, he would visit me no more. The toys would still come, but Santa would not. That winter, I was very nearly ostracized by my friends because I refused to lose Santa by saying that he was not real. By the time I was 30, they’d given up on sophisticating me and just rolled their eyes when I talked about him.

The magic of Christmas isn’t just about Santa Claus, but it is every bit as delicate and wondrous as the belief of a child. I know people who embrace the story of Christ because they’re afraid not to, and people who believe because they feel in their hearts that God sent his son to live among us, to teach us and to die for us. And I know people who believe that it’s all about colored lights beneath the surface.

I believe because of the magic. I won’t look beneath the surface, because there is no need. When I walk outside after dark and see Venus shining in the December sky, I know that kings followed that same heavenly body to see the Baby Jesus, born to save us all. I am a lover of science and a believer in miracles.

When I was a little girl, there was a fountain in the middle of town. I know what made the water change colors. But I believe it was made of Kool-Aid.

“The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” - Albert Einstein, “The Merging of Spirit and Science”