This past September marked the one hundred and sixteenth anniversary of the most reprinted newspaper editorial of all time in the English language. The back-story is just as important … so I’d like to reprise/update this account, if you’ll follow me after the jump ….
In my early twenties I encountered the famous editorial with words Yes, Virginia as the answer to the question “Is there a Santa Claus?” A writer-or-two have gone so far to blame it for encouraging government dependence (yes, really). For myself, I simply thought it was overly trite, banal.
Well, it took two decades before I re-read it …… and saw the error of my ways.
Indeed, I now see this editorial as taking its place alongside other Yuletide stories that …. in reality, are only set in Christmas … but concern much larger issues than Christmas.
A Christmas Carol, for example, is Charles Dickens’ take about the treatment of the poor (more akin to “Hard Times”). And the film It’s a Wonderful Life deals more with an individual’s life than Christmas – with George Bailey being cited by the Move Your Money campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic.
The “Yes, Virginia” editorial does not mention Jesus, nor the commercial aspects of Christmas ….. nor even, as you will see, the actual human figure of Santa Claus himself. Instead, it is saying in in my mind’s eye, “Blessed are those who are moved by more than sight and touch, and the power of the unseen”.
Before presenting it ….. let’s look at the back-story ……
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Laura Virginia O’Hanlon was born on July 20, 1889 in New York. An avid reader with a quizzical mind as a child (which would stand her in good stead later in life, as we will see), she would often send-in letters to a Q&A column in the New York Sun newspaper.
On her 8th birthday in July, 1897 she asked her father Dr. Philip O’Hanlon (a coroner’s assistant in Manhattan) the very delicate question of whether Santa Claus existed:
Quite naturally I believed in Santa Claus, for he had never disappointed me. But when less fortunate little boys and girls said there wasn’t any Santa Claus, I was filled with doubts. I asked my father, and he was a little evasive on the subject.
It was a habit in our family that whenever any doubts came up as to how to pronounce a word or some question of historical fact was in doubt, we wrote to the Question and Answer column in The Sun. Father would always say, “If you see it in the The Sun, it’s so” and that settled the matter.
“Well, I’m just going to write The Sun and find out the real truth,” I said to father. He said,
“Go ahead, Virginia. I’m sure The Sun will give you the right answer, as it always does.”
This she did, which may have seemed like a strange question to be asking during the mid-summer heat of the big city. For the editor of the Question and Answer column also punted on the subject … bucking it up the chain until – three months later – it finally reached the desk of one of its editorial writers.
Francis Pharcellus Church (born in 1839) had a father who had been both a Baptist minister and journalist who founded The New York Chronicle. Francis Church himself had been a war correspondent for the New York Times during the Civil War and was an unsentimental man whose personal motto was, “Endeavor to clear your mind of cant.” At age 58 when he wrote the editorial (unsigned, as was the paper’s policy), Church married shortly after it appeared.
The editorial appeared on September 21st, 1897 – one hundred and sixteen years ago this past autumn. And while it appeared alongside other editorials, of seeming unimportance: this one – in today’s parlance – went viral given the limitations of the day (use this link if the below is not legible):
Francis P. Church died in 1906 at the age of sixty-seven – interestingly enough, he did not have children of his own – and was not revealed as the author of this editorial until after his death. Yet despite the notoriety of the editorial, The Sun did not begin to reprint it each year until the 1920’s. The Sun folded in 1949 (although the title has been revived in more recent years by a conservative publisher).
Virginia O’Hanlon went on to a master’s degree at Columbia and even referenced the editorial in her doctoral dissertation (“The Importance of Play”) at Fordham University in 1930. She taught in the New York City schools and eventually became a school principal before retiring in 1959.
She answered letters she received over the years with a copy of the editorial (pointing out that “All I did was ask a question; it was Mr. Church who wrote the editorial”) and drawing on her childhood discomfort about the subject, she once wrote:
Some little children doubt that Santa still lives because often their letters, for one reason or another, never seem to reach him. Nurses in hospitals know who some of these children are. Teachers in great city schools will know others.
Dear children of yesterday: won’t you try to seek out these trusting children of today and make sure that their letters in some way reach Santa Claus so that “he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood?”
She was briefly married and had one son. Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas died in May, 1971 … two months short of her eighty-second birthday.
But the legacy lives on, as many newspapers reprint the editorial each year. In 1991, there was a made-for-TV movie (starring Charles Bronson and Richard Thomas), books have been written on the subject and in 2003 the department store Lord & Taylor dedicated one of their Christmas windows (with mechanical figurines moving) to the story. And to this day, you will read OpEd pieces, essays and editorials which will use the phrase “Yes, Virginia” for effect.
One additional legacy comes from The Studio School in New York which was founded in the same year that Virginia O’Hanlon died (1971). In the 1980’s, they moved to the Upper West Side and in 2003 (needing extra space) purchased a building at 115 West 95th Street …. the very building in which Virginia grew up in. Virginia O’Hanlon’s granddaughter sent a check to help defray capital costs, and the school erected a plaque to mark the spot. Four years later in 2009, the school announced a Virginia O’Hanlon Scholarship – which her descendants describe this way: “A full circle has been completed.”
This story has been set to music and stage presentations … and just recently the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra performed the first orchestrated concert version of the story.
And finally, for those of you in the New York area: each Christmas, a veteran newsman recounts the story of this editorial. Gabe Pressman is a senior correspondent for the local NBC affiliate – who gave a quite prescient commentary in 1987 about how the Gary Hart scandal news coverage would drag down journalism – and who records (a shortened) version of the Yes, Virginia story that appears on the Channel 4 evening news on Christmas Eve (both at 6 and 11). He considers it to be New York’s version of “A Christmas Carol”.
It’s not that they do that many things. But the things they do, they do a LOT of.
We open gifts with my mom’s side of the family on Christmas eve — one at a time, so that everyone can see what everyone else got. This used to be a big deal, with a lot of pictures being taken and hugs between gifts… but most of my family has died off, so it’s rather muted now. On Christmas day we open gifts with my dad’s side of the family. This was always kind of chaotic, with everyone ripping into their presents simultaneously and “thank you, so-and-so’s” shouted from across the room. It’s less disorganized now that there are fewer people involved. 
