I always thought Superman and Santa Claus had a lot in common.

No, really; think about it. They both hang out at the North Pole in their down time. They both have distinctive costumes recognized by people all over the world. They both have alliterative secret identities (Clark Kent, Kris Kringle). They're both adored by kids. They're both known for their good deeds, and their ability to navigate the globe at phenomenal speeds...while airborne, no less.

How else do you account for Saint Nick's reported ability to know when you're sleeping or awake, and when you've been bad or good, unless he has...stay with me, now...x-ray vision and super-hearing?

Well, that may be stretching it a bit, but from my point of view as a youngster, Santa and Superman had another thing in common: I wanted to believe in both of them. Notice I said "wanted to." Somewhere deep in the minds of even the youngest kids, there's that party-pooping voice of reason that won't let us forget the difference between fantasy and reality, no matter how much we may want to. But for a few years there, when you're a kid, there's always that slim hope that wishing hard enough for something might make it come true.

It's the theory that leads kids to think constantly about the toy they most want for Christmas, as if the karma generated by all that thinking might materialize the object of their desires. It's an idea exploited in "Peter Pan," when all the kids in the audience are told that through the combined might of their faith, Tinkerbell just might come back to life.

I applied it to magic; sure, deep down I knew the tricks those TV magicians performed were just that; tricks. But it sure was a lot more fun if you chipped in with a suspension of disbelief, and reserved just a tiny part of your heart and mind to think maybe, just maybe there was such a thing as real magic in the world, and you were seeing a hint of it. Who knows, maybe if the whole audience was chipping in with the same kind of supportive vibes, then their combined positive energy might actually contribute to a miracle on stage.

I also applied this thinking to Superman and Santa Claus; maybe they weren't real, but maybe they could be. Surely they deserved to be. As long as there were kids to believe in them, maybe there was some hope they'd materialize. But if someday we all gave up on them, they'd wink out of existence forever. Hey, I wouldn't want to contribute to killing off Santa or Superman, right? At the very least, it seemed like giving up on fantasy figures was a sort of milepost that separated childhood from maturity, and I was in no hurry to cross that line.

In other words, while not quite believing they were real, I also postponed accepting that they weren't. In this I was aided and abetted by great old films like "Miracle on 34th Street," which said, basically, that grown-ups were the real dopes, because they'd given up believing in things that even small children could have told them were real. That kind of inverted Hollywood logic really appealed to me.

Okay, so maybe I was a weird kid. I don't know if it's possible to convey here in words something that I just sort of felt rather than conciously reasoned out. My only consolation is that George Schulz seems to have understood where I was coming from. Every Halloween in his Peanuts strip, he'd draw Linus out in the pumpkin patch, trying to stay up all night for a glimpse of the Great Pumpkin, convinced that whichever kid believed the hardest, and stayed most faithful, would get to meet that great spirit. One year, surely, it would be Linus' turn.

That's kind of how I felt about Superman, and Santa. If one kid in the whole world was going to get to see a streak of red and blue fly over his house, or hear the clatter of reindeer hoofs on his roof, I wanted it to be me. Then I could shake my hero's hand and say, "I'm the kid who never gave up on you." Of course, I never did experience such an encounter. Which at this point is probably about the only thing stopping you from sending the guys with butterfly nets to cart me off to a padded room.

Anyway, this year I had the good fortune to spend Thanksgiving in the company of my four-year-old nephew, who suddenly informed me that he was going to play Superman for a while, then stopped to look me in the eye and explain, significantly, "Superman helps people." I'm not sure how he caught on to that, or even where he heard of Superman -- probably from watching a tape of his new favorite film, the "Iron Giant." But it doesn't matter, really. The point is, Superman has spoken to the next generation and the message has been received, loud and clear. Somehow that makes the old pumpkin patch a little less cold and lonely.

Happy holidays to you and yours, and keep an ear out for noises on the roof.

- David Morefield
"Nightwing of Kandor"