‘Yes, Virginia’ Letter Writer Becomes as Immortal as Santa

While others age, Virginia O’Hanlon is forever a little girl thanks to The New York Sun. Her letter asking if there’s a Santa Claus, and the paper’s response, helps each new generation of parents answer childhood’s trickiest question — and encourages everyone to hold onto the magic of Christmas.“I am 8 years old,” O’Hanlon wrote the Sun in September of 1897. “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?”The editor of the Sun, name of Mitchell, handed the letter to Francis Pharcellus Church, an editorial writer of the Sun, who could have been forgiven for passing on the thorny subject dropped in his lap. Instead, Church handled the topic with delicate hands and wrote an eloquent defense.“Virginia,” Church began, “your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. 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.”Virginia O’Hanlon, circa 1895. Via Wikimedia CommonsFor the rest of her life, O’Hanlon’s destiny was linked with the Sun. The editorial she inspired is the most reprinted in English and has been translated for those of about two dozen other tongues. It was “known to as many readers,” the Sun reported in 1914, “as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.”O’Hanlon held onto her belief after she had children of her own. The Sun reported that she had given birth to a daughter, Laura Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas, in June 1914. As December approached, the mother hung a copy of her “famous letter … on the baby’s Christmas tree.”“The Sun’s Virginia of 1897,” the headline read, “tells her own Virginia that there is” a Santa Claus “and proves it.” The Sun wrote that while “a good many Christmases have come and gone since” the original letter, time could not erase Church’s eloquent recitation of truth.The Sun “never quite lost sight of Virginia,” and dispatched a reporter to her home to check in with her as a 26-year-old mother. They reported that “the most important thing in the world to her, except for her marriage and her baby, has been her faith in the realness of Santa Claus.”“Are you still the Sun’s Virginia?” our man asked O’Hanlon when she answered the door. She laughed. “Indeed, I am,” she said, and invited him to interview the “far more important Virginia in the house,” her infant daughter.Editorial writer Francis Pharcellus Church, who penned the Sun’s reply to Virginia O’Hanlon. Via Wikimedia Commons“I think,” O’Hanlon said, “that I have never been so happy in my life as when the Sun told me there was a Santa Claus and that he would live forever.” She had been “just at the age where doubts creep in and when most children get their first touch of cynicism.”O’Hanlon said, “The children at school teased me,” snarking that “the only Santa Claus” was her father, “who dresses up and slips presents in the house when you’re not looking.” That made O’Hanlon “very unhappy.” She resolved to petition the Sun for proof.“Father laughed,” O’Hanlon recalled, saying the Sun was “too busy writing about presidents and governors and important people.” They had “no time to waste on a little girl. Write if you want to, but don’t be disappointed if you never hear” a response.‘Santa’s Portrait,’ detail, by Thomas Nast, published in Harper’s Weekly, 1881. Via Wikimedia CommonsThat made O’Hanlon “very unhappy,” but she was undeterred. If the Sun had said there was no Santa Claus, she told her father, she would believe it. “If it tells me Santa Claus is real, I’ll make those girls at school sorry they ever teased me.”“Day after day,” O’Hanlon said, “I looked for a letter in reply.” One day, someone from the Sun called and asked her father if he knew his daughter had “become a famous person.” Those pint-sized doubters at school, and cynics for all time, had been shut down for good.The letter, O’Hanlon said, didn’t help her alone. She heard from “thousands, literally thousands, whose lives were sweetened by it” year after year. “I am anonymous from January to November,” she told Time in 1971, but when Christmas rolled around, letters and calls from reporters arrived.O’Hanlon died at 81 in May 1971. But the letter she delighted in sharing as an educator and reading for audiences fixed her in time as a child, our immortal Virginia. “Yes,” parents and teased children have been saying for 126 years, “there is a Santa Claus.”A clipping of the 1897 editorial in The New York Sun replying to Virginia O’Hanlon’s letter. Via Wikimedia Commons

‘Yes, Virginia’ Letter Writer Becomes as Immortal as Santa

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