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.

Van Allsburg frames *The Polar Express* as a meditation on belief: not merely belief in Santa or Christmas, but the broader human capacity to assent to wonder when evidence is thin. “Faith” here is sustained by imagination—an inner faculty that keeps the world porous to mystery and meaning. The quote also names a common developmental arc: childhood readily accepts enchantment, while adulthood often trades that openness for skepticism. By casting the loss of “magic” as something that “disappears as we grow older,” he suggests the book’s emotional stakes are restorative—inviting readers to recover, even briefly, a mode of seeing in which the extraordinary remains possible.