Iconic letter that captures real essence of Christmas

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Never mind the efforts of advertising agencies to capture the spirit of Christmas by looping some slow ballad over shots of returning sons and daughters downing own-brand supermarket cakes.

If you want something that encapsulates the spirit of Christmas, then look no further than the famous ‘Dear Virginia’ letter that first appeared in the New York Sun of September 21 1897.

Virginia O’Hanlon – who, with a name like that, must have been one of our own – was from West Ninety Fifth Street in New York.

She was eight years old and some of her friends were saying there was no such person as Santa Claus – so Virginia wrote to her local paper to seek the truth because, as she put it: “Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun, it’s so’.”

Please tell me the truth, she asked the editor, is there a Santa Claus?

And even if you’ve read it a million times and every Christmas of your life, his reply still has to bring a lump to the throat and a tear to the eye.

“Virginia,” he says, “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 external 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 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.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.