Child’s Letter a Tradition Skeptical Age Cannot Afford to Surrender
Anderson Observer Editorial Board
Every year at Christmastime, as predictably as artificial snow in a department-store window, a small, 417-word editorial from 1897 steps back onto the stage and clears its throat. The byline has long since fallen away, but the headline has become a kind of seasonal catechism: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
The story begins in a New York City that was still getting used to electric lights and elevated trains, where newspapers advertised themselves as arbiters not just of fact but of reality itself. In the summer of 1897, an eight-year-old girl named Virginia O’Hanlon, the daughter of a New York City doctor, wrote to the editor of the New York Sun with a question that had outgrown the authority of her parents and her playmates: “Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?” Her father, the story goes, had told her that if it was in the Sun, “it’s so,” outsourcing parental metaphysics to the city’s most confident daily.
Virginia’s letter arrived at a moment when the paper—like the city it covered—was negotiating the tension between skepticism and belief. The Sun’s editors handed the note to Francis Pharcellus Church, a 58-year-old editorial writer and veteran of Civil War correspondence, who reportedly “bristled and pooh-poohed” the assignment before sitting down to answer the child. What he produced under deadline, anonymously, was a brief meditation on faith, wonder, and epistemology disguised as a reply to a little girl in need of reassurance.
Church’s answer, published September 21, 1897, never actually leads with its most famous line; it builds to it. Under the sober headline “Is There a Santa Claus?,” he tells Virginia that her little friends are “wrong,” that “they have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age,” and then issues the sentence that will be remembered: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” Santa, in his framing, exists “as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist,” a comparative clause that quietly relocates the debate from the chimney to the human heart.
The trick of the piece is that it answers a literal question with a metaphysical one, insisting that “the most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.” Church had seen, in the war and its aftermath, the corrosive power of disenchantment, and here he makes a counter-offer: a universe in which unseen things—kindness, hope, delight—are granted the status of facts. The Santa Claus of the editorial is less a bearded benefactor than a shorthand for the social decision to act as if generosity were not only admirable but ontologically necessary.
Newspapers, which are supposed to be as perishable as the day’s weather, rarely produce anything that outlives the fish they wrap, but “Yes, Virginia” proved the exception. The Sun began reprinting the editorial annually at Christmastime, and over the twentieth century it migrated far beyond its original column, turning up in papers around the United States, in books, on greeting cards, and eventually on television, where it inspired dramatizations and a 1991 made-for-TV movie. The piece is now widely described as the most reprinted newspaper editorial in history, translated into some twenty languages and read aloud at events as varied as Columbia University’s Yule Log celebration.
If Church stayed largely in the background—his authorship was not widely known until after his death in 1906—Virginia herself became a kind of living footnote. The press checked in on her periodically as she grew up, noting that she pursued higher education, earned a doctorate, and made a career as a New York City educator, even as she continued to receive and answer letters from children who had read about her question. Her handwritten note, still kept by her descendants, has become its own small relic, proof that a child’s earnestness can have a longer shelf life than a daily front page.
No text survives a century without collecting both devotion and dissent, and “Yes, Virginia” has accumulated its share of critics along the way. As early as 1935, columnist Heywood Broun dismissed the piece as a “phony” exercise in sentimentality, suspicious of its polished uplift and its refusal to grapple with the transactional reality of Christmas as practiced in American households. In 1951, a Christian Reformed congregation in Lynden, Washington objected that the editorial encouraged Virginia to see her parents and friends as liars, an early salvo in what would later be called the “Santa wars” of modern parenting.
By the late twentieth century, the editorial had taken on an additional, unintended function: it became a kind of lazy Susan for harried editorial pages. Rick Horowitz, writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1997, complained that “Yes, Virginia” offered editors an excuse to avoid writing their own Christmas pieces, allowing them to “slap Francis Church’s ‘Yes, Virginia’ up there on the page and go straight to the office party.” The charge stuck because it felt, in a way, like a backhanded compliment: the editorial’s language had become so canonical that it could stand in for original thought, in much the same way a standard carol can displace newly composed music.
And yet, each December, the column resurfaces, undeterred by its detractors and improbably fresh for a piece written before radio. Part of its endurance lies in its refusal to argue about the wrong thing; Church declines to litigate the logistics of rooftop access and reindeer velocity, and instead posits Santa as an index of how seriously adults are willing to take a child’s capacity for wonder. In a culture that tends to confuse sophistication with disenchantment, the editorial offers a compact defense of believing in things that cannot be itemized in a ledger or photographed with a phone.
The other reason is structural: “Yes, Virginia” belongs to a small canon of journalistic pieces that double as seasonal rituals, hauled out not so much to inform as to consecrate. Newspapers that reprint it are participating in a kind of civic liturgy, acknowledging that once a year, even in the age of click-through metrics and social-media outrage, there is value in dedicating precious column inches to an argument for the reality of unseen generosity. For all its Victorian phrasing, the piece remains quietly radical in its assertion that the most consequential truths are often the least quantifiable, and that answering a child’s letter seriously may be one of the few traditions a skeptical age cannot afford to surrender.
