"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus," Virginia O'Hanlon wrote.
"He lives, and he lives forever," Francis Church answered.
On Sept. 21, 1897, the New York Sun published a letter from 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, who was beginning to doubt the existence of a certain jolly, old elf.
“Please tell me the truth,” she wrote, “is there a Santa Claus?”
The answer came from Francis Church, a well-known editorial writer who began his career as a correspondent during the Civil War.
He denounced a skeptical age, in which people demanded scientific proof and refused to believe in anything that couldn’t be examined or calculated or explained.
“The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see,” Church told Virginia. “Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.”
Friendship cannot be weighed. Justice can’t be observed through a telescope, nor peace discovered in a laboratory.
And yet they are as real, if not more real, than the moons of Jupiter and the isotopes of uranium.
Children might grasp this profound truth better than jaded adults. But Church was worried that without old St. Nick, boys and girls would succumb to a cold materialism.
“Yes, Virginia,” he declared, in one of the most quoted lines ever written for a newspaper, “there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist.”
But no matter what assurance she got from the Sun, Virginia surely figured it out herself eventually.
And when the realization finally hit, did it reinforce her faith in the higher truths of love and generosity?
Or did the skeptics seem right after all, that nothing is real that can’t be touched or seen?
If reindeer can’t fly and if toys don’t come from elves at the North Pole, what is Virginia to think of that other Christmas story, which doubters might find even more implausible?
“Is Santa real?” my 4 year old asked the other night, not for the first time.
“No,” I told him again, like I always do when the subject comes up. “He’s just a story, like Mickey Mouse and the Cat in the Hat and Jake the pirate.”
I don’t blame parents for giving a different answer, and I warned my son not to spoil it for his classmates.
Maybe I am depriving him of a little innocent fun. But he took it in stride, looking up from his train set to ask another question.
“Is Mary real?”
And, of course, he could trust me to tell him what I truly and honestly believe.
Speaking of Santa, my colleague Bill Sherman beat me to it. CLICK HERE for advice on what to tell kids.And you can read Virginia’s letter and Church’s whole response HERE.
