Is there a Santa Claus?

This is the question that Virginia O'Hanlon, aged 8, asked her father one day in 1897. She had doubts about Santa's existence and wanted to know the truth. Her father's reply was a suggestion: Why don't you write a letter to the Sun? If you find it there, it is so.

Virginia followed her father's advice and this is the answer she could read in the New York Sun on September 21st.

Read and listen to her letter and the newspaper's editorial.

This is the newspaper clipping.

Read the complete text of the editorial the newspaper published.

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.

Since then, Virginia became an icon of the Christmas holidays in the U.S.A. and received thousands of letters until her death in 1971.

Answer these questions:

• What are your thoughts about the story?
• Do you think Virginia could still have doubts after reading it?
• When and why did your own uncertainty begin?
• Does the real world threaten innocence?

Here 's a trailer of an animated movie made in 2009: