Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.

Stephen Leacock (1869–1944), the Canadian humorist and political economist, often wrote seasonal essays that mixed sentiment with satire. This line is associated with his Christmas writing in which he treats the holiday as a kind of collective, benevolent “make-believe” that becomes real through shared participation—people act as if goodwill, generosity, and reconciliation are natural and expected, and the social performance helps bring those virtues into being. The remark reflects Leacock’s characteristic method: gently mocking conventional pieties while also defending them as socially useful, even morally transformative, rituals.

Leacock suggests that Christmas works less by proving lofty ideals than by enacting them. The “make believe” is not mere childish fantasy; it is a deliberate social fiction—treating kindness and fellowship as if they were already the norm. When many people commit to that fiction at once, it produces real effects: generosity increases, grudges soften, and communities briefly reorganize around care rather than calculation. The quote also hints at the power of narrative and ritual in human life: shared stories can shape behavior, and behavior can, in turn, reshape reality. Leacock’s humor underscores a serious claim about how moral habits are formed.