On the morning of September 21, 1897, readers of the New York Sun opened their papers to the editorial page and found six items. The first five covered local politics, a water board dispute, and — in the seventh slot, tucked below all of them — a recently invented chainless bicycle. The sixth item, buried at the bottom, was a response to a letter from an eight-year-old girl asking whether Santa Claus was real. Nobody at the Sun imagined anyone would still be talking about it a hundred and twenty-seven years later.
They would have been wrong.
The Girl and the Question
Virginia O’Hanlon lived with her parents on West 95th Street in Manhattan, the daughter of a police surgeon named Philip O’Hanlon. In the autumn of 1897, her friends had begun delivering the news that children everywhere eventually deliver to each other with a certain grim satisfaction: Santa Claus wasn’t real. The only Santa, they told her, was her own father, who dressed up and slipped presents into the house when she wasn’t looking.
Virginia wasn’t convinced. But she needed more than her father’s reassurance. Dr. O’Hanlon, perhaps buying himself some time, suggested she write to the New York Sun. “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so,” he told her. Then, perhaps sensing she was taking him seriously, he added: “A newspaper has no time to waste on a little girl. Write if you want to, but don’t be disappointed if you never hear from it.”
Virginia wrote anyway. Her letter was short, direct, and entirely without guile: *”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?”*
She waited for a response day after day. Eventually she forgot she’d sent it at all.
The Man Who Bristled
The Sun’s editor, Edward Mitchell, handed Virginia’s letter to his lead editorial writer, a 58-year-old journalist named Francis Pharcellus Church. Church was not delighted by the assignment. According to Mitchell, he “bristled and pooh-poohed” when asked to respond to a child’s question about Father Christmas. It was, by any measure, an unlikely task for the man sitting across from it.
Church had spent the Civil War as a battlefield correspondent, filing dispatches from some of the bloodiest engagements of the conflict. He had seen what people were capable of at their worst. He had co-founded two magazines with his brother and spent years writing about politics, war, and the weightier concerns of the age. A letter from a child on the Upper West Side was not exactly in his wheelhouse.
He wrote the response anyway, under deadline, in fewer than 500 words. It appeared anonymously on September 21, 1897 — no byline, no fanfare, tucked below the chainless bicycle.
It began: *”Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.”
And then, a few lines later: “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.”
Church didn’t write a fairy tale. He wrote something closer to a philosophical argument — that the things which matter most are the things you cannot hold in your hand or prove in a laboratory. That a world without Santa Claus would be a world without poetry, without wonder, without the particular kind of faith that makes childhood what it is. That even the strongest mind, the most rigorous thinker, cannot imagine all the wonders that are unseen and unseeable.
For a man who had walked through some of the darkest chapters of American history, it was a remarkably generous thing to write.
What Happened Next
The Sun reprinted the editorial every Christmas until the paper closed in 1950. It has since been translated into twenty languages, set to music, and adapted into films. Historian Gerald Bowler called it the most famous editorial ever written. It is certainly the most reprinted.
Francis Church never knew any of this. He died in 1906, nine years after writing those 500 words, without ever receiving public credit for them. His identity as the author wasn’t revealed until after his death. He went to his grave not knowing what he had made.
Virginia O’Hanlon, on the other hand, lived with the letter for the rest of her life. She grew up, earned a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College, a master’s from Columbia, and a doctorate from Fordham — where her dissertation, fittingly, was titled *The Importance of Play*. She spent forty-seven years as a teacher and principal in the New York City school system, retiring in 1959. People wrote to her about the letter constantly. She answered them all. She was still receiving letters when she died in 1971, at the age of eighty-one.
Her original letter to the Sun never left the family. It still hasn’t.
Why It Lasts
The story could so easily have gone differently. A different editor might have thrown the letter away. A less reflective writer might have produced something dutiful and forgettable. The editorial might have run on a slow news day and been noticed, or on a busy one and been missed entirely. Instead it landed in the seventh slot on an editorial page below a piece about bicycles, and somehow found its way into permanent residence in the human heart.
What Church understood — despite his bristling, despite his war correspondent’s instinct for hard truths — was that the question Virginia was really asking had nothing to do with a man in a red suit. She was asking whether the world was worth believing in. Whether goodness was real. Whether the things her friends cynically dismissed were worth defending.
He thought they were. He said so in 500 words, anonymously, under deadline, in September. And a little girl on West 95th Street got her answer.