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, a question published in the New York Sun on September 21, 1897

She was an elderly woman in a hospital near Albany, NY, on Christmas Day 1969. When a hospital maintenance worker who always dressed as Santa for Christmas came around her room, someone thought to take a photo of the handshake between Santa and Mrs. Douglas, who looks quite delighted indeed.

Mrs. Douglas and Santa shared a long history together, and they still do. Christmas is a day in which we can re-meet ourselves, re-meet ourselves as children, experience a sensation of faith if not faith itself. A little photo from 1969 of an elderly patient with Santa is a small glimpse of one such small moment.

More than seventy years earlier, Mrs. Douglas was Virginia O’Hanlon, an eight-year-old girl in New York City, who asked her father one day in the summer of 1897 whether Santa Claus is real.

He suggested she write to the city newspaper, the New York Sun, so she did. Virginia wrote: “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?”

Francis Pharcellus Church, a 58-year-old editor who had been a Civil War reporter and who had edited and published many periodicals in the decades since, was asked by the paper’s editor-in-chief, Edward Mitchell, to compose a reply to Virginia. Church was not a father, but Mitchell’s instinct was pitch-perfect: in 416 words, Francis Church demonstrates how to not be a cynic and how to write to an eight-year-old with emotional honesty.

On September 21, 1897, Church’s unsigned reply, “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus,” was published in the Sun. It remains the most widely reprinted newspaper editorial in history. It is perhaps the only editorial that has been set to music. Church wrote:

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 there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
 
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could 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.

The letter and Church’s response were instantly famous and remain so to this day.

Virginia O’Hanlon grew up to become a teacher. She married, became Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas, earned a doctorate from Fordham University, taught in the New York City school system for many decades and became a principal, raised a daughter as a single mom because Mr. Douglas died or abandoned his family in the 1910s. This is a life that could have earned her fame beyond what a letter her eight-year-old self once wrote might have earned her, but that letter and its reply stuck in the public consciousness like a Christmas carol whose words have been memorized not by effort but by repetition. Late in life, Virginia said that she was “anonymous from January to November.”

She retired to the Albany area, where at Christmas 1969 she happened to be in a hospital. A hospital maintenance worker named John Harms every year dressed as Santa Claus to visit the patients who were unlucky enough to be stuck in a facility like a hospital on Christmas Day. When he visited Mrs. Douglas, someone was quick-witted enough to grab a camera to capture the moment when the Virginia who once asked if she could believe in Santa Claus finally “met” Santa:

(Click for full size.)