"DEAR EDITOR: 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?
This letter, written in 1897 by Virginia O'Hanlon, and answered by Francis Pharcellus Church, editor of THE SUN, has become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial.
Here at home we are debating the same question. When my children were wee ones I told them Santa was pretend—I got them, though, the year the carrots we put out for the reindeer had disappeared come morning.
Now DD has her own wee one, he is almost two now, and she has decided that Santa ought to be a belief, much like the success philosophy we have been expounding. And so we wonder, how does one convey a belief in a thing when the thing is fiction?
So what is Santa? Is he a concept, a belief, a figment? Can we judge him by what he does for people? We wish strangers a Merry Christmas when we normally wouldn’t say anything to them at all. Perhaps Santa is a metaphor that gives us permission to be nice, to wear silly sweaters and to drink eggnog, to read The Night Before Christmas story over and over, and each time feel the thrill of waiting for morning to see what Santa brought.
Maybe there is a Santa, a Father Christmas, a spirit that makes glad the hearts of children and adults. Maybe he doesn’t live at the North Pole, but he lives on, passed heart to heart. Without the spirit of Santa Claus we might give a present, as with birthdays, but not with the lavishness that Christmas brings. We have to fill all the stockings and then turn to the tree and dump our bag of gifts under it.
What was your favorite Christmas?
My step dad said that as a family with five boys they didn’t have much money for presents, but one year the fire department had painted bicycles and tricycles and restored toys and come Christmas their family found more presents under the tree than they had ever seen in their lives. That made a believer out of him.
A believer in what? In magic? Dreams? That wishing will make it so? That whatever we put our attention on will come to pass? What about the genie that is our own subconscious what works to bring to us what we focus on. The Secret? The Secret? What is the secret? The spirit of peace and good will to all?
“No Santa Claus!” writes Church. “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.”
