Quote of the Day: Chris Van Allsburg on Parenting & Family

We’re told growing up means trading magic for maturity, closing the book on make-believe and opening a spreadsheet. But what if that bargain is the real naïveté? Chris Van Allsburg insists the opposite: “The Polar Express is about faith, and the power of imagination to sustain faith. It's also about the desire to reside in a world where magic can happen, the kind of world we all believed in as children, but one that disappears as we grow older.”

Read closely, and “faith” here isn’t a sermon. It’s a daily posture: the willingness to trust what can’t be proved yet, to keep a door unlatched for the possible. The adult world trains us to treat wonder like a liability, something to outgrow, like a toy left behind on the sidewalk. Van Allsburg reframes it as a strength, the inner muscle that lets us move forward when evidence is incomplete and outcomes are uncertain.

Imagination, in his telling, isn’t escapism; it’s equipment. It doesn’t deny reality, it helps us endure it without shrinking. The child who hears the bell is practicing a form of attention our culture steadily disciplines out of us: looking for meaning, listening for what’s quiet, refusing to let cynicism become “realism.” That’s why the story still stings. Not because we miss Santa, but because we recognize how easily wonder gets crowded out by deadlines, disappointment, and the tidy comfort of disbelief. Protecting it is an act of resilience, and, quietly, courage.

Chris Van Allsburg earned the right to make that argument by building entire worlds where ordinary rooms tilt into the extraordinary, most famously in classics like Jumanji and The Polar Express, which he also illustrated with cinematic precision.

If you don’t feel magical on an April Wednesday, try a smaller experiment: act as if wonder is a practice, not a mood. Call someone you miss. Take the longer walk. Read fiction before bed. Faith, after all, often starts as a decision to listen for the bell.