Does Santa Claus really exist?

Dear Editor.

I am now 8 years old. My kids say that Santa Claus isn't real. Dad says, "If you read The Sun and say the same thing, then it's true."
So please tell me the truth: Is there really a Santa Claus?

Virginia O'Hanlon
115 West 95th Street

Francis Pharcellus Church, editor of the New York Sun, was a war correspondent during the American Civil War. He witnessed the suffering brought by the war and experienced the sense of despair that pervaded the hearts of people after the war. He wrote back to Virginia in the form of an editorial.

Virginia.
Your little friends are wrong. They have fallen prey to the skepticism of this paranoid age. They don't believe what they don't see. They think that what they can't think of in their little minds, doesn't exist.
All minds, Virginia, adult and child alike, are small. In this vast universe of ours, man is but a tiny worm, and our intelligence is like an ant compared to the intelligence needed to grasp the whole truth and knowledge of the boundless world around us. Yes, Virginia, Santa Claus exists, just as love, kindness and devotion also exist in this world. They give you the most sublime beauty and joy in life.

Yes! What a dull world it would be without Santa Claus! It would be like not having a lovely child like you, not having childlike innocence of faith, not having poetry and romantic stories to ease our pain. The only joy that humans can taste is what they can see with their eyes, touch with their hands, and feel with their bodies.
touch, and feel in the body. The light that filled the world as a child may all be gone.

Don't believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not even believe in elves anymore! You can have your dad hire people to guard all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus.

But even if they do not catch, what does it prove?
No one can see Santa Claus, but that does not mean that Santa Claus is not real.

The most most real thing in this world is what neither adults nor children can see. Have you ever seen elves dancing in the grass? Definitely not, but that doesn't prove they aren't there. No one can imagine all the wonders of this world that have not been seen or invisible.
You can tear open a child's rattle and see what exactly is rattling inside. But there is a barrier between us and the unknown that even the strongest man in the world, all the strongest men put together with all their strength, cannot tear open.

Only faith, imagination, poetry, love, and romance can help us break this barrier and see behind it, the world of unspeakable beauty and radiant dazzle.

Is all this true? Ah, Virginia, there is nothing more real and permanent in the whole world.

No Santa Claus? Thank God, he is alive now, he is alive forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, no, ten thousand years from now, he will continue to bring joy into the hearts of children.

On September 21, 1897, the New York Sun published this editorial on page seven, which, though inconspicuously placed, quickly attracted attention and became widely circulated, and still holds the record for the most reprinted newspaper editorial in the history of the English language.

After growing up as a young girl, Paginia became a teacher and devoted her life to children as a vice principal in public schools before retiring.

Paginia died in 1971 at the age of 81. The New York Times sent out a special news article for her entitled "Santa's Friend," in which it was introduced: the most famous editorial in the history of American journalism was born because of her.

The New York Times commented that the editorial not only answered the little girl's question in the affirmative, but also explained to everyone the ultimate meaning of the existence of all holidays. The romantic imagery of the holidays is a concentration of goodness and beauty, and the belief in the original meaning of the holidays will always allow us to have a deep faith in love.