'Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus'
On September 21, 1897, The Sun published a little girl's question and an editor's timeless answer — the most reprinted newspaper editorial in English.
An eight-year-old girl wrote a letter, and the answer came back as the most beloved editorial ever printed.
Virginia O'Hanlon lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and her friends had given her terrible news: there was no Santa Claus. Her father suggested she write to The Sun, a respected New York newspaper — reportedly telling her that if something appeared in that paper, it must be true. So Virginia wrote a short note: "Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?"
The letter landed on the desk of Francis Pharcellus Church, The Sun's lead editorial writer — a 58-year-old journalist who had once covered the Civil War as a correspondent. He reportedly sighed at the assignment. Then he sat down and, in a few hundred words, wrote something timeless.
On September 21, 1897, the editorial appeared, unsigned, on the paper's editorial page under the modest headline "Is There a Santa Claus?" Church's authorship wouldn't be revealed until after his death in 1906. His answer began gently — "Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age" — and then rose to its famous conclusion: "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."
It was buried deep inside the paper that day. But the piece was quickly picked up by other newspapers, and The Sun — at first reluctant — began reprinting it every Christmas season, a tradition it kept every year from 1924 until the paper closed in 1950. The editorial has been translated into roughly 20 languages, adapted into television specials, a film, a musical, and a cantata, and it remains the most reprinted newspaper editorial in the English language.
Virginia herself grew up to become a teacher — a fitting career for the girl whose letter taught the world something — and she spent her life sharing the editorial with children. When a reporter asked her in 1959, at age 70, whether she still believed in Santa Claus, she answered that of course she did: everybody wants to know that someone kindly is interested in his well-being, she said, and whether it is really a person or a spirit doesn't matter very much.
The piece endures because it was never really about Santa Claus. It was about wonder — about the unseen things, love and generosity and devotion, that give life its highest beauty and joy. One editor, one little girl's question, and 129 years later we're still reading the answer.
Photo: Rose O'Neill (1903), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
