Père Noël

Some of you may recognise the cherubic red-head in this vision of Yuletide bliss as the spirited putto from Gaston Cervelli's satirical cartoons, Fighting and Bawling Babies (swipe left!). Here the artist presents a gentler evocation of childhood: and indeed a Christmas scene that captures the essence of why the myth of Père Noël endures.

The Santa story is a fiction—a living fiction in which as parents we participate in order to bring the story to life for one magical night. In this supremely beautiful drawing Cervelli evokes this dreamlike world of childhood imagination and possibility: qualities that are mourned as we pass into adulthood.

In the United States in 1897, the eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon asked her father whether Santa Claus really existed. Her father suggested she should ask this in a letter to the newspaper, The New York Sun. The reply came: 'How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.'

May your dreams come true this Christmas—and fighting and bawling be kept to a minimum!