According to Edward Mitchell, the immediate superior who assigned writing a published reply to a letter to the editor sent to the New York Sun by an eight-year-old named Virginia asking whether Santa Claus exists or not, the man charged with carrying out that assignment greeted it with a depressed sigh before heading back to his desk with shoulders slumped amid an invisible cloud of compliant acquiescence to completing an undesirable task.
The question that is almost invariably asked about this reaction on the part of that writer is how a man well known for being a cynical skeptic toward all things taken on faith—a man who well have been an outright atheist but was certainly at least a deep-seated agnostic—could have wound up writing an editorial that so sincerely outlined a philosophical ideology of belief in that which can’t be seen. The question seems misplaced and is perhaps only asked because the resulting editorial has been so universally accepted as a work of sincerity. That Francis Church wrote such a sustained argument based on the logical premise explicitly stated in the piece itself—"The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see”—raises not so much the question of what happened to allow him to pen such a sincere assertion of supporting blind faith, but a much more intriguing question: how have so many millions of readers been so easily duped?
“Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” is almost impossible to accept on the terms by which it became the most famous and republished editorial in American history. In addition to the premise quoted in the paragraph above, consider that the logical argument supporting the writer’s assertion that Santa Claus is real also contains such doozies as “”Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus” and, in response to the rhetorical query posed to Virginia on the question of whether she has ever actually seen fairies dancing, “Of course not, but that’s not proof that they are not there.”
The plain facts of the case are clear. Church definitively affirms for Virginia that there is a Santa Claus and then proceeds to run away from the obvious foundation of the girl’s letter: is there really a person, an entity, a humanoid called Santa Claus who delivers presents via sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. Church instead presents Santa Claus as a metaphor for generosity and love. But even this sleight of hand still requires a steadily progressing argument supporting its contention constructed upon one absurdity after another. At one point he suggests that Santa Claus must exist because Virginia exists and the absence of either would the world dreary. The capper, of course, is the centerpiece of his evidence: not actually seeing a thing cannot be taken as proof that the thing does not exist.
Only two conclusions can be drawn. Either Francis Church was suffering the effects of early onset dementia or he was writing the most brilliantly subtle work of ironic satire in the history of literature. Neither of which, of course, explain how so many millions of readers have managed to so completely miss the point.
