Rochester's Connection to Virginia’s Question “Is There a Santa Claus?”

Since the beginning of the century, newspapers and magazines each Christmas reprint the puzzled question of a little girl, “Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?” And with it they publish the reply written by a gruff turn-of-the-century newspaperman from Rochester, New York, which contains the reassuring exclamation, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!”

 This exchange has become part of contemporary American folklore. It fits into the mood of today’s Christmas celebrations, its doubts, and a continuing need for reassurance. But how did it begin? Who was the questioning little girl, and who was the Rochesterian who answered her? And even more, whatever became of them after this exchange?

 At the time she posed her question (1897), Virginia O’Hanlon was eight years old and lived with her parents at 115 West 95th Street in New York City. She was the daughter of Dr. Philip F. O’Hanlon, a consulting surgeon for the New York Police Department. She later recalled that, being an only child, her parents “did everything for me that any parents could do.” She believed in Santa Claus “quite naturally,” as he had “never disappointed” her; but when other little boys and girls told her that there really wasn’t any Santa Claus, she was “filled with doubts” and found her father “a little evasive on the subject.” As she told the story to a group of students at Hunter College, this is what followed:

 “It was a habit in our family that whenever any doubts came up as to how to pronounce a word, or some question of historical fact was in doubt, we wrote to the ‘Question and Answer’ column in the Sun [then a daily paper in New York]. Father would always say, ‘If you see it in the Sun it’s so,’ and that settled the matter.

 “‘Well, I’m just going to write to the Sun, and find out the real truth,’ I said to father.

 “He said, ‘Go ahead, Virginia. I’m sure the Sun will give you the right answer, as it always does.’”

 Thus she wrote:

 “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?

 Virginia O’Hanlon,

115 West 95th Street,

New York City”

 She mailed it off to the paper, and began looking every day for a reply in the Question and Answer column. Virginia became more and more disappointed. No reply appeared, and she felt that “the editor had not thought my letter important enough to answer.” What she didn’t know was that, at the newspaper, her letter had been given to Francis Church, one of the editorial writers for the paper. [His colleagues later said that he had not at first cherished this assignment!]

 Just who was this reluctant newspaperman? Francis Pharcellus Church was born in Rochester, New York, on February 22, 1839. He graduated from Columbia College in 1859 and began the study of law, which he put aside to write. The New York Times, for whom he had served as Civil War correspondent before joining the Sun as an editorial writer, noted (May 14, 1971) that Church, the son of a Baptist minister, was “a man of sardonic bent whose personal motto was, ‘Endeavor to clear your mind of cant.’”

 The Times also said: “Virtually unknown by name outside his own personal and professional circles, Mr. Church specialized in writing editorials on controversial theological subjects. He had been on the staff of the Sun for about 20 years when the assignment to answer Virginia’s letter came to him.”

 It was some time before his answer was ready, and Virginia had no idea that anything was being done with her letter. Then, one day, Dr. O’Hanlon called his daughter from his downtown office and told her, “Virginia, they did answer your letter. They gave you a whole editorial.”

 The Sun editorial, entitled, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!” appeared on September 21, 1897. It began by saying, “We take pleasure in answering at once and thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great satisfaction that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of the Sun.” After giving the text of the girl’s letter, the editorial continued:

 “Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. 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.

 “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. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith, then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment except in sense and sight. The Eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

 “Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they 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. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders that are unseen or unseeable in the world.

 “You tear apart the baby’s rattle to see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, not even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived can tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

 “No Santa Claus! 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.”

 Church couched his interpretation in ornate, didactic phrases. This befitted an editor intent on preserving a child’s fancy yet also obligated to the claims of reason. His editorial was a landmark in the crystallization of Christmas sentiments in this country, for it affirmed a belief dear to children and assented to by adults.

 Church’s reply became famous and the Sun ran that column every Christmas Eve for nearly fifty years, until the paper went out of business. The letter last appeared in the Sun in 1949. Ten days after Christmas, on January 4, 1950, the paper ceased publication; it merged with the New York World-Telegram, which kept the words and Sun on its masthead.

 The Times also recalled that “the editorial was reprinted annually before Christmas in the staid columns of the Sun, but until he died, married but childless, nine years later on April 11, 1906, it was not generally known that Mr. Church was the author.” In fact, the Times admitted that, in its own obituary of Francis Church and in an editorial that followed, the paper did not mention “Virginia’s letter and Mr. Church’s reply.”

 Now, what happened to Virginia? She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College, New York, in 1910 and a Master’s Degree from Columbia University the following year. In 1912 she became a teacher in the New York City school system. Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas spent a total of forty-seven years in the New York school system.

 While working as a grade-school teacher, Virginia O’Hanlon studied for her doctorate, which she received from Fordham University. She became a junior principal in 1935. The obituary noted that “for three years before she retired, Mrs. Douglas, by then a widow, had been junior principal of Public School 401 in Brooklyn, which holds classes in hospitals and institutions where children are chronically ill”.

 At the age of forty-four she revisited her alma mater, Hunter College, and told students that the newspaper’s reply to her childhood inquiry had been the outstanding event in her life. Shortly before her retirement she reflected on this event, and on her involvement with children, their hopes and ideas. She said that children “were naturally so sincere and so serious about things that you feel you wouldn’t want to disappoint them.” Thus, the reassurance she had received as a girl of eight became, in the elaboration of her work as a teacher, a basic theme of her career.

 The New York School of Printing reproduced the Sun’s Santa Claus editorial for Mrs. Douglas’ private use as a handsomely printed sheet. She used the sheet to answer requests for the text, which continued throughout her life. It was a message which, in many and more sophisticated ways, she communicated to the thousands of children who were her pupils during nearly half a century of teaching, as she thought to “make glad the heart of childhood.”

 Mrs. Laura Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas died in Valatie, New York, on May 13, 1971, at the age of eighty-one. Murray Ilson, in the Times obituary, said that “no editorial was more famous” than that inspired by Virginia’s letter.

 In her obituary, published May 14, 1971, The New York Times made up for its earlier omissions. It observed that Mr. Church’s famous words became “one of the best-known editorials in American journalism,” later “spread around the world in countless reprintings, in newspapers and anthologies, and in translations into some 20 languages.”

 Virginia’s question and Church’s heartwarming reply will be reprinted and read for a long time to come.