Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

by Guest Writer | Dec 23, 2018

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

The headline from this famous editorial from the Editorial Page of New York Sun in 1897 is well-known. The actual letter is less well-known, and neither is the back story about the editorial writer and the letter writer. We reprint the letter here, and below it the story of Virginia O’Hanlon and Frank Church.

THE EDITORIAL

We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a sceptical age. They do not believe except what 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 external 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 you 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 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, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view andpicture 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 lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

THE BACK STORY

Francis P. Church’s editorial, “Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” was an immediate sensation, and became one of the most famous editorials ever written. It first appeared in the The New York Sun in 1897, almost a hundred years ago, and was reprinted annually until 1949 when the paper went out of business.

Thirty-six years after her letter was printed, Virginia O’Hanlon recalled the events that prompted her letter:

“Quite naturally I believed in Santa Claus, for he had never disappointed me. But when less fortunate little boys and girls said there wasn’t any Santa Claus, I was filled with doubts. I asked my father, and he was a little evasive on the subject.

“It was a habit in our family that whenever any doubts came up as to how to pronounce a word or some question of historical fact was in doubt, we wrote to the Question and Answer column in The Sun. Father would always say, ‘If you see it in the The Sun, it’s so,’ and that settled the matter.

” ‘Well, I’m just going to write The Sun and find out the real truth,’ I said to father.

“He said, ‘Go ahead, Virginia. I’m sure The Sun will give you the right answer, as it always does.’ “

And so Virginia sat down and wrote her parents’ favorite newspaper.

Her letter found its way into the hands of a veteran editor, Francis P. Church. Son of a Baptist minister, Church had covered the Civil War for The New York Times and had worked on the The New York Sun for 20 years, more recently as an anonymous editorial writer. Church, a sardonic man, had for his personal motto, “Endeavour to clear your mind of cant.” When controversial subjects had to be tackled on the editorial page, especially those dealing with theology, the assignments were usually given to Church.

Now, he had in his hands a little girl’s letter on a most controversial matter, and he was burdened with the responsibility of answering it.

“Is there a Santa Claus?” the childish scrawl in the letter asked. At once, Church knew that there was no avoiding the question. He must answer, and he must answer truthfully. And so he turned to his desk, and he began his reply which was to become one of the most memorable editorials in newspaper history.

Church married shortly after the editorial appeared. He died in April, 1906, leaving no children.

Virginia O’Hanlon went on to graduate from Hunter College with a Bachelor of Arts degree at age 21. The following year she received her Master’s from Columbia, and in 1912 she began teaching in the New York City school system, later becoming a principal. After 47 years, she retired as an educator. Throughout her life she received a steady stream of mail about her Santa Claus letter, and to each reply she attached an attractive printed copy of the Church editorial. Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas died on May 13, 1971, at the age of 81, in a nursing home in Valatie, N.Y.

Revisiting Harry’s love affair with the clouds and stars

by George Le Masurier | Dec 24, 2017

At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest, no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or a fortnight at a time, but there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse.
… Thoreau in Walden

I/dropcap] once took a series of photographs of a man named Harry. In his own way, Harry modeled the life of Thoreau. He lived alone in a shack he built himself 25 years earlier, while he was slipping into legally blindness. When technology made it possible to transplant new sight into his eye sockets, Harry vowed to see the world from a different perspective.

During each subsequent Christmas season, this individualist shared the view from his perch in a letter he wrote “to the world.”

Like Thoreau at Walden, Harry drew much out of his solitude, contending that his treasures are memories tucked away in his mind “to be brought forth when the long nights become lonely, like this one.” He wrote this letter on one of those lonely nights.

“It’s Christmas time again. White ruffled curtains are sifting the moonlight. The soft yellow lights from the neighbor’s kitchen are buttering the falling snow. Yesterday’s puddles wear a grey skin of ice and our ponds have shut their eyelids on the winter cold. The evergreens are mittened with frost.”

Harry spent a lot of time with nature. He loved birds and animals. He was never an important man by the standards of status and financial success. He was a logger for a while and finished his working career as a janitor.

But he was a keen observer, a rough poet, a witty, wise old man who had a long love affair with clouds and stars.

“I stood in awe and wonder. Dawn started emerging from the womb of night, and slowly the sun was chinning itself on the horizon. Pillowed clouds, gently aired by a slight breeze, seemed like hooded friars telling their beads in the morning sun.”

Harry often turned nostalgic.

“I grew up in the days when you could buy a nickel’s worth of something, when sex education was learning to kiss without bumping noses, when buying on time meant getting there before the store closed, when health foods were whatever your mother said you’d better eat and when it cost less to educate your son that it does now to amuse his children.”

A man of little formal education, Harry spent most of his hours of solitude reading classics. He also kept up with current events and lamented the frenetic modern world.

“When I was young, we had little mental anguish, no tense nerves to frustrate the spirit. The hardships were usually resolved by a good night’s sleep. Our lives were tranquil and uncomplicated, not plagued by the traumatic turmoil or the age of the spaceship and the terrorist. We didn’t want much because we didn’t see much to want.

“The answer to the world’s problems may be in that statement.”

There was a small marsh near where he lived. He spent more time than usual before his small wood stove that year. At 80 years, it felt colder than it really was.

Harry never became pessimistic. He embraced nature as a buffer to a world he did not fully understand. Or didn’t want to. He died during his sleep some years back, probably after his nightly ritual.

“The last thing I do every night before retiring is to step out the back door and look upward.”

To continue his love affair with the clouds and the stars.

Decafnation originally published this essay in 2016

The Christmas fudge arrived with a resounding thud

by George Le Masurier | Dec 8, 2016

It landed on our doorstep with a resounding thud. It measured about the size of a thick hardcover novel. It weighed more than 100 copies of “War and Peace” bound together. But all there was to read was a simple card, which said, predictably, “To my brother. Love, your sister, Lynne.”

It comes every year. It is fudge … the traditional Le Masurier Christmas Fudge.

At some point during my childhood my mother went on a fudge-making binge. I have no idea why she did this. Maybe for a small-town housewife in the 1950s it was a more acceptable means of relieving stress than, for example,12 straight days of hard drinking.

Or, maybe someone just gave her a recipe and told her how easy it was to make. In any case, she made so much fudge every holiday season that we all got sick from it.

That just goes to prove how truly amazing the human body really is. You can feed your body a five-pound block of cocoa solidified by a railroad car of sugar and eggs, and the stomach cramps you get will make it seem like your body is rejecting it.

But in reality, your body is magically turning all that fudge into something really useful like fingernails and eyebrows. At least, that’s what mom told me.

After she dealt with her baking neurosis and addicting me to chocolate, she made fudge just once a year, for my birthday, which is a week before Christmas (still time to send large cash gifts!).

When I moved away from home, my mother continued to make fudge and sent me a box or two every year for my birthday. It had all the attributes of a great gift: hand-made, conjured wonderful childhood memories, edible and, most importantly, made of chocolate.

My parents have both passed on now, bless their souls, but the Christmas Fudge tradition lived on in the embodiment of my sister. She insisted on making fudge every year and sending me a birthday box the size and weight of a cement block. It must cost her a small fortune in postage stamps.

Of course, over the years, we’ve added a few new Christmas baking traditions of our own. So, by the time we get through my mother’s daughter’s fudge, a Gingerbread House, the annual nuts and bolts party mix and my son’s Ritz Bits smothered in a rich ranch flavoring that will give us all instant heartburn, we should almost be ready for Christmas dinner. And the Day After Christmas dinner and New Years Eve dinner and New Years Day Watching Football dinner, with a few lunches and breakfasts and late-night ice cream snacks thrown in.

When Jan. 2 finally rolls around, none of us will be capable of anything more than crawling from chair to couch and back to bed. And none of us will have any idea who ate all the fudge or what kind of body parts it turned into.

The good news is that modern medicine has developed new surgical methods, such as the kind performed on Al Roper, to look around inside your body and find the fudge that got stuck behind some fat cells instead of making new fingernails like it was supposed to.

Fortunately, my mother’s daughter no longer considers birthday fudgeness an appropriate expression of her sibling affections. We now exchange nice, low-fat emails instead.