On Santa Claus
12-26-2025 — Adam Schaefers
Answering the Question Plainly
In 1897, an eight-year-old girl named Virginia O’Hanlon wrote to a New York newspaper asking whether Santa Claus was real. Some of her friends said no. Her father suggested she write to the paper and ask.
Francis P. Church's reply did not beat around the bush,
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
They did not need to argue that Santa existed as a physical curiosity. But instead that Santa existed because Faith, Hope and Charity exist. The mistake, was assuming that only what can be seen is real.
The same defense was later made more bluntly by Chesterton,
“Mythology is not the mother of lies; it is the mother of truth.”
And again:
"Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of the bogey.
What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of the bogey."
And so the child already knows the world is a scary place. The question the child needs answered is only whether goodness survives in it.
Santa Claus names the answer.
Not as a man to be disproved, but as a symbol that endures because it points to something real.
And still yet again:
"The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder."
And so to the world that is starving for want of wonder, Let's say together with the Editor,
Yes, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus.
Addendum:
It has come to my attention that Microsoft [vscode] has bent the knee to the modernist grinches, scrooges and would-be-wonder-usurpers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-i98GFcH48
Perhaps now may be a good time of the year to reflect, why do programmers struggle with myth and the non-literal?
Merry Christmas.