Is there a Santa Claus?

[Hawkeye60]

“Dear Editor,” Virginia O’Hanlon started her letter to the editor, “I am 8 years old.”

The young girl from New York City penned a letter in September 1897 to the New York Sun, explaining: “Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says ‘If you see it in The Sun it’s so.’ ”

 

 

Then came the pointed question: “Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?"

The letter, written in careful cursive, prompted a response so touching and timeless that it has been shared countless times over the past century — and become its own classic Christmas story.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” editorial writer Francis Pharcellus Church anonymously answered in the newspaper. “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias."

Virginia of ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’ grew up to be a teacher

Over the years, especially during the holiday season, the iconic Christmas editorial has inspired music and movies and stage plays, even a cartoon.

Throughout her life, Laura Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas, a longtime schoolteacher, also spoke about and recited it to other young children, explaining, “The older I get, the more I appreciate its philosophy.”

In 1959, when asked whether she still believed in Santa Claus, the then-70-year-old O’Hanlon told a reporter: “Well, of course I do. Everybody wants to know — particularly at Christmastime — that there’s some kindly person interested in his well-being. It gives a glow to living. Whether it really is a person or a spirit doesn’t really matter very much — does it? Some people say we shouldn’t believe in things we can’t see. This is most unrealistic. Look at all the nice things that have happened to me because of Santa Claus.”

Not long before her death in 1971, she said that she still believed in Saint Nick.

The editorial — which was buried deep on Page 6 of the Sun on Sept. 21, 1897 — has been called “American journalism’s best-known editorial.”

It read:

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. 

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. 

Not believe In Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. 

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. 

No Santa Claus! Thank God he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]