“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!”

 

Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of New York’s Sun , and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial appearing in the paper on the 21st of September 1897 – 111 years ago! Since then it became history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial.

 

 

 

 

The Editor Francis Pharcellus Church replied:

 

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 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 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 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!!!