The Miracle of Soot Prints: Should We Encourage Children to Believe in Santa Claus?

The heart of Christmas is about believing. Believing in the impossible means believing in miracles.

Today so many children no longer believe or their parents have become so jaded that is cannot help but to rub off on the children. Remember, "yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" or Miracle on 34th Street? Come on, if you watched them, then you cried. They were moving. And the related the importance of believing.
Until I was ten years old, every Christmas morning, my sister and I would wake up and rush into the living room. What would our eyes see first thing, every year? The soot prints from the fireplace to under the tree. (Do I have the greatest dad or what?)

I would see the footprints and go running through the house, screaming and hollering that Santa had come. My parents would bustle from their bed and Daddy would mind me to go back to my room until all was ready. I usually just went into my sister's where we would giddily chatter about what we glimpsed under the tree. Before you knew it, the sound of the bell could be heard throughout the home (a cow bell- not just any old little bell) and the aroma of cinnamon rolls and cocoa permeated through the home. Time to go back out to the tree.

The family would gather around for cocoa and rolls while Daddy would pass out gifts.
Don't you just love the fact that as neat consciousness as my parents were, the fact that there were soot prints the size of my father's size 12 feet seeping into the carpet did not faze them in the least?

I have the best parents, eh?

Did I forget to mention that even though my mom always said Santa prefers Tab soda to milk and cheese to cookies, I still believed? The only way I knew something was amiss was that my mom, for years, had been leaving notes written with her right hand (so not to resemble either parent); however, she slipped up when I was eight years old and wrote the note in her own left hand. I would have kept on letting them leave the soot prints, but we put in hard wood floors. Otherwise I would never have said a word, because I understood that the fact that I still believed meant more to my parents, than to me. It meant to them a miracle, however small, had occurred each and every Christmas morning.

Absolutely I encourage children to believe in Santa. I wish people would watch their words in public so little ears couldn't hear anything untoward.
I encourage my children to believe in Santa and what he means. He represents miracles. What is wrong in that?

p.s. The Easter Bunny always left bunny feet tracked in dirt, too.