Every year around Christmas time, the Prairie Grove Enterprise used to print local kids’ letters to Santa. I’m not sure when it started, and I’m not sure if they still print them, but as far as I was concerned, it was the best issue the small town weekly paper printed all year.

Some of the letters were hilarious, some of them were heartbreaking, but they almost always demonstrated this incredible ability that kids have; to be able to believe that anything is possible, if you just ask Santa.

Kids would ask for crazy stuff, like helicopters, machine guns, or zebras in their letters, and sometimes they’d ask for impossible things like for Santa to cure a family member’s terminal illness, or for Santa to bring back a lost grandparent or loved one.

The ability to wish in this way gets beaten out of us as we get older. Reality hits us and that’s a good thing I suppose. We can’t go around writing letters to Santa as adults. That’d be weird.

But if you ask me, being able to daydream or to wish for something that seems impossible is a virtue. It’s something that we don’t do enough of as adults and I think as a result, we give up on things that may not be as impossible as they sometimes seem to be.

Fayetteville is an amazing place. But as much as Fayetteville rules, there are plenty of things that could make living in this city even better.

If you could somehow suspend your sense of grown-up reality for a moment, and recapture the spirit of the letters to Santa that you wrote a kid, what would be your Christmas wish for Fayetteville?

Would you wish for a better music scene? An arts festival? More jobs? A better local economy?

Would you ask old Santa for an Indian food restaurant? A Dickson St. parking deck? A Six Flags?

These are some of the things we’ve heard you guys wish for over the past year. I guess the purpose of this discussion is to amplify those wishes in the hopes that someone with the means, authority, or super powers necessary will hear them. After that, who knows?

They don’t have to be completely far-fetched, but they can be.

What should Santa bring Fayetteville for Christmas?