What *really* is “magic”? The science behind the season’s token feeling.

And how you can help create it around your dinner table.

Here’s a little [cocoa] drinking game for you; if you find yourself watching holiday reruns and commercials this week, take a sip anytime anyone mentions “magic”.

The concept is everywhere in advertising. In commercials for DisneyWorld—”The Most Magical Place On Earth”. Coca Cola: (“Real Magic”). Even the crime-against-noses that is Axe Body Spray: (“Find Your Magic”).

In Christmas movies, “magic” is an especially crucial plot device. It’s how the season’s most famous elves—Bernard and Buddy—explain Santa’s powers. It’s how the lawyer in Miracle on 34th street explains Kris Kringle’s sanity. It’s why the bell in the Polar Express only rings for some people.

The concept has become so culturally endemic that we hardly notice we’re not talking, literally, about Houdini-style sleight-of-hand tricks; we’re talking about a feeling.

And yet, try as the admakers might to convenience you otherwise, it’s a feeling that can’t be bought. The Grinch says it outright: “The magic of Christmas doesn’t come from a store.”

So, where does it come from?

An article from The Atlantic, published in December 1913, tried to investigate— describing “the spell of Christmas” as a “shower bath of gladness,” where we’re “elated, even jubilant, ready for laughter and tears, sympathetic with the children in their glee, strangely accessible to life’s best memories.”

Earlier this month, The New York Times sought to gather practical examples of what creates holiday magic. When asking over 600 readers about the best Christmas present they ever received, a common theme was thoughtfulness—gifts that would require not wads of cash but instead “time and presence.” There was the father that hand-selected and wrapped library books for each of his kids in the days leading up to Christmas. The boyfriend that flooded his partner’s apartment with pinwheels to help rewrite her painful childhood association with them. The daughter who plastered the hands of everyone in their extended family, and created a display of ‘waves’ that could greet her mother long after December 25th.

The New York Times roundup touches on something dozens of loneliness researchers told me when I wrote my book: “The best gifts make the recipient feel seen.” The thing that separates good gifts from bad gifts is the same thing that separates good friends from mere acquaintances. And if we want to get better at friendship and gift-giving alike, the best investment we can make is in our attention—a commitment to better understand, and explicitly appreciate, the qualities and quirks that make our loved ones who they are.

Priya Parker, one of my favorite ‘magic’ creators, has some wisdom to help. Her writing on the art of gathering involves coming up with “magical questions— ones that people both want to answer, and people genuinely want to hear. They might include:

• What was your first concert you went to, and who took you?

• What rule did you have growing up that now feels a bit unnecessary?

• What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever found in your pocket?

• What was the best gift you ever received?

I’d love to hear from you — how do you experience ‘magic’? What’s a magical question you love to ask and answer?

In the meantime, I wish you lots of magic of your own, and a reminder of what it *really* is through the toast my Mom gives every year: “It’s not the presents under the tree. It’s the presence around the table.”