Cheerful Tidings

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Six generations after The New York Sun — in the most famous newspaper editorial ever issued — reassured Miss O’Hanlon, age eight, that, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” we are called upon again. This time it’s not Miss O’Hanlon’s “little friends,” as she put it in her letter to the Sun, who are insisting there is no Santa. It’s a professor, at Harvard University no less, who has been consulted by Politico, which is reporting that the teacher is denying the existence of Saint Nick. So a telegram from a reader asks us to “weigh in.” An editor’s work is never done.

Politico is quoting Laura Nasrallah, an associate professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Divinity School at Harvard. A picture of her on the Web gives the impression that she is a person of cheerful spirit. That and her line of work would suggest Ms. Nasrallah’s confusion is a bit different from that of Virginia O’Hanlon’s friends who were, the Sun explained, “wrong” and “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.” For it seems, according to the Web site of the Massachusetts Bible Society, that Ms. Nasrallah in her teaching emphasizes “issues of colonialism, gender, status, and politics.”

No wonder she’s denying the existence of Santa. Not only is she denying his existence — “take it from an expert,” is the way Politico starts its story, “Santa Claus isn’t real” — but she is claiming “questions about his racial identity ‘don’t make any sense.’” She’s in a swivet about the statement of a competing sage, Megyn Kelly, who asserted on Fox News that Santa is white. “That’s a really odd claim,” Politico quotes Ms. Nasrallah a saying, “because Santa doesn’t exist.” She voices just one hesitation. “Don’t tell my three kids.”

The professor wouldn’t be the first person whose own children had the better part of wisdom in respect of Santa. Ms. Kelly herself had her facts right, referring, as she apparently was, to the actual original Saint Nicholas, the Christian cleric who died in 343 of the common era. She wasn’t referring to the Santa Claus about whom so many children wonder, who climbs down chimneys. It was this latter Santa on whom the Sun got the scoop a century ago, though we don’t mind disclosing that we ourselves have wondered what to do about it.

Should the Sun run the famous reply to Virginia O’Hanlon every year? Is the editorial appropriate in a newspaper that has passed into the hands of an editor who is Jewish? Readers of the paper were asking that we reprint the famous reply to Virginia O’Hanlon. Should we comply? Laugh not. We puzzled over this for some time and finally did what we often do when we need someone wise. We took it to a rabbi. Several of them, in fact. And not just any rabbis. We took it to several sages of a rank and degree of Orthodoxy that would be unquestioned even by the heads of the greatest yeshivas.

We sent them the whole editorial of more than a century ago. It warned Virginia about the skeptics. “They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.” Wrote the Sun: “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.”

It never occurred to the Sun of Virginia O’Hanlon’s time to get into the question of Santa’s race. We have an idea of what it would have said, because of these famous sentences. “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.”

That’s what we sent to the Torah sages, along with the rest of the Sun’s famous editorial. Their replies were unanimous. They found it delightful, a joyous articulation of faith. “Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.” That’s how the modern Sun came to reprint annually the reassurances to Virginia O’Hanlon. Our advice to Professor Nasrallah is that if she doesn’t want her three youngsters to be told there’s no Santa, she shouldn’t give a wire service interviews to the contrary. We send the message to her with the same warm greetings we extend to Ms. Kelly and to our modern readers. Merry Christmas.


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