The New Yorker:

When a young New Yorker asked a newspaper whether St. Nick exists, the response became an immortal catchphrase. Who is she, all grown up?

By James Thurber
December 11, 1936

One day in September, 1897, somebody placed on the desk of Mr. Edward P. Mitchell, of the New York Sun, a letter to the editor written in the slow, round hand of a little child. Just who sorted it out from the rest of the letters to the editor that day, there is no one to remember; certainly Mr. Mitchell did not go through them all himself, for he had more important things to do. The Sun’s great editor, Charles A. Dana, lay dying at his home on Long Island and Mr. Mitchell was in charge in his place. It is safe enough to say that anyone skilled in the ways of a newspaper would have realized the journalistic value of the communication. It was never printed in the Letters to the Editor columns; it appeared as a part of the Sun’s leading editorial of September 21st, and it has reappeared in that place on Christmas Eve every year for the past thirty-eight years. You must know, certainly, that we are talking about the letter written to the Sun by an eight-year-old girl asking whether there was a Santa Claus. The childish scrawl has passed into tradition. It may come to you as a surprise, however, that “Is There a Santa Claus?” was first printed so long ago that it is eighteen months older than “A Message to Garcia,” whose grandiose history we gave in these columns recently; but so it is. Little Virginia O’Hanlon, who wrote to the Sun: “I am 8 years old. . . . Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?,” is forty-seven now; she fixed her age forevermore when she was a little child. More than two hundred thousand pamphlet reprints of the editorial—letter, date of its first appearance, and all—have been sent by the Sun to people who have requested them.

Before we turn to the grown-up Virginia let us pick our way back to that September day in another century and see what happened after Mr. Mitchell read the letter. Legend has twisted the facts. Many people believe that the editorial was written by Charles A. Dana himself; but Mr. Dana was too ill even to know about it. It appeared anonymously, as all editorials do except the big, pompous ones by the Hearsts and the Macfaddens. It was not, in fact, until nine years later, in April, 1906, that the thousands of people who had pasted the editorial into scrapbooks, or carried it around in their billfolds, knew who had written it. On April 12th, 1906, the Sun ran an editorial on the death of one Francis Pharcellus Church, who had been a member of the newspaper’s staff for thirty-five years. It said, “At this time, with the sense of personal loss strong upon us, we know of no better or briefer way to make the friends of the Sun feel that they too have lost a friend than to violate custom by indicating him as the author of the beautiful and often republished editorial article affirming the existence of Santa Claus, in reply to the question of a little girl.”

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