Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith: Children's Myths in Contemporary America

Is it good or bad for children to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy? Clark, an ethnographer and an adjunct faculty member of DePaul University's marketing department, maintains that such make-believe helps children grow into adults capable of faith and of imaginal experiences--experiencing that which is not physically present--such as dreams, prayer and fantasy. She brings to this delightful study a light touch, a cross-cultural perspective and solid fieldwork including interviews with children and their parents as well as videotaped observations of children's visits with a shopping-mall Santa and Easter bunny. Clark ransacks folklore and popular culture to retrieve shed-tooth rituals, seasonal rites of passage and anthropomorphic rabbit figures from around the world. Interestingly, many of her young interviewees associated these mythic figures of childhood with God or the supernatural. (Apr.)