To mark St. Nicholas Day I am bringing my 2011 CD sampler forward to today from its proper place in this chronology. That is because all of the songs on this one are related to Santa Claus and that year’s liner notes told his story. Because of that theme almost all of the songs were pop music (although I mostly avoided children’s songs.)
Warning: This is probably a love-it-or-hate-it musical experience and very different from all of the others! Instead of showing off the diversity of music on the compilation this sampler-of-the-sampler are all ones that vied for airplay on the radio when I and the other early boomer babies were young children in the early 1950s. In keeping with my propensity to share overlooked gems, only one of these songs can be said to have remained popular as a well-known Christmas song (although others may linger on the edge of your Christmas recollections if you are old enough.) Four of them are recordings from that time and two are later covers. See if you can recognize which two are the ringers.
Special treat alert: After today’s recollections I have the first of my special treats taken from the text of the liner notes. I have edited them into a story that I call The True History of Santa Claus and is based on meticulous research on my part. I hope you like it.
Playlist:
* Ol’ Saint Nicholas Doris Day 2:25
* The Man with the Bag Lee Ann Womack 2:29
* Reindeer Boogie Hank Snow 2:18
* The Christmas Boogie The Davis Sisters (Skeeter Davis) 2:09
* Santa Baby Inside Scarlet 3:26
* You Can See Old Santa Claus Gene Autry 2:11
Music notes:
Ol’ Saint Nicholas This song was written and composed by Inez James and Buddy Pepper, Hollywood songwriters who frequently collaborated together. This recording was made by Doris Day in 1949 as a Columbia 45 rpm single. 33 rpm albums were first introduced in 1948 but the first Christmas album was not until 1955. Doris Day did not release one until 1964.
The Man with the Bag is also known as (Everybody’s Waitin’ for) the Man with the Bag. Kay Starr’s 1950 recording of it was a very popular in the early 1950s, making the December Billboard Top 40 pop song list for four years in a row! Songwriting credit for it is given to Irving Taylor, Dudley Brooks and Hal Stanley, but since Stanley is more known as a businessman, not as a musician or songwriter, and was both agent for and married to Kay Starr at the time, I suspect that his song-writing credit for the song is honourific. The song is sung here by country music singer Lee Ann Womack who recorded it on her 2003 A Season for Romance album.
Reindeer Boogie was recorded by in 1953 by Hank Snow with his back-up band The Rainbow Ranch Boys. Songwriting credit is given to Snow, Donnie Brooks and Cordia Volkmar.
The Christmas Boogie This lively reinterpretation of The Night Before Christmas was written by songwriter Cy Coben and was recorded in 1954 by The Davis Sisters. The name of that country music duo may not sound familiar, but one of them was Skeeter Davis. She was one of the first women to achieve major country music stardom as a solo vocalist, and both Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton acknowledged her as having been a very important influence for them.
Actually the Davis Sisters were not really sisters. They were best friends who had enjoyed singing together in high school. After graduation they went professional and Mary Frances Penick adopted the stage name Skeeter Davis so that she and Mary Jack Davis could perform as sister act. (Skeeter, slang for mosquito, had been her nickname since early childhood. Her father said it was because she had so much energy.)
Santa BabyThis is the one song in this set that was ever a big Christmas hit. Eartha Kitt’s 1953 rendition of it went to the Top of the Billboard Christmas music chart in that year despite the fact that she was a black women and many white radio stations rarely played inter-racial music at that time, let along songs with this kind of suggestive undertones related to an interracial relationship.)
The song has become an enduring minor Christmas classic and Kitt’s rendition is still considered the definitive version despite the fact that it has been covered by such sex symbols as Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. But this is a much more recent version, recorded on A Las Vegas Christmas by the group Inside Scarlet featuring vocalist/guitarist Sharay Larsen. The song was written by lyricist Joan Javits and composer Phillip Springer (who is now 98 years old.)
You Can See Old Santa Claus Gene Autry launched a lot of huge Christmas music hits in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, including Here Comes Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but this is not one of them. On the other hand, I don’t really care for any of those, but I chose this song to close out my 2011 Santa-focused Sampler (and I always like to end on a high note.)
Autry released this in 1956 as the B side of a 45 rpm single that had Johnny Marks’ Everyone is a Child at Christmas on its A side. Composition and lyrics credits for the song go to the Nashville songwriters Joe Johnson, Lefty Frizzell and Bobby Adams.
Sampler-making recollections
This was a very thematic sampler that was several years in development. Normally I select the songs first and only begin to write the liner notes after I am reasonably sure that it will not be cut from the compilation. But in this case I began with a story that I wanted to tell and swapped around songs to get a best fit to both match the story-line and produce a good flow musically.
Besides having developed a large collection of Christmas albums, to aid in researching my liner notes I was also developing a library of reference books about Christmas music and the history of the holiday. And these days of course the internet is also a great tool for historical research, but in both cases one needs to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. I discovered a lot of interesting little-known things about the Santa story that I want to share with people. So the text of the liner notes turned into an exploration of Santa Claus’ historical roots and evolution, as well as the conventional lore about his red and white suit, his North Pole base of operations, and his sidekick reindeer, elves, Mrs. Claus, etc.
Finding the right music for this project proved to be more difficult than I expected. I wanted songs that would appeal to adults -- songs that are lighthearted but without being juvenile or sugary-sweet. That is tough to find since most Santa-related songs were recorded to be children’s music. These songs songs come from pop-music sources and are mostly unfamiliar. I was very relieved when I thought that I had pulled this year’s project off satisfactorily.
Here is a lightly-edited version of the relevant parts of my 2011 liner notes:
The True History of Santa Claus
Every year hundreds of millions of children around the world wake up on Christmas morning and find that they have been given gifts by a legendary benefactor. Countless others already opened their gifts on December 6 or Christmas Eve, while others will not get theirs until New Year's Day or January 6. This has been happening for nearly 1000 years.
It began in France in about the year 1100, and the phenomenon quickly spread throughout Christian medieval Europe. In the past century the phenomenon has spread all around the world to non-Christian countries as well, and is now beginning to take hold in such unlikely places as Iraq, India and China.
The children are not surprised by the seasonal gifts – they have been eagerly anticipating them. Although the children never see their benefactor, they know the name of their patron and have a clear understanding of his appearance, mode of transportation, and companions. The legendary gift-bringer has many identities, depending upon the country and cultural context.
Generally it is a grandfatherly figure, but in some parts of the world it is an elderly women or a holy child. Many are personified as angels, saints, elves or gnomes, and in a few places it is an animal. To many, the gift-bringer is known as Father Christmas (in whatever local language), or as Weihnachtsmann, Papa Noël, Joulupukki, Knecht Ruprecht, Belsnickel, Grandfather Frost, or other regional personae.
In North American, our gift-bringer is Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nick or Kris Kringle. The name is derived from a purported Roman-era benefactor, Saint Nicholas. Nicholas was an actual person, but reliable historical information about him is scarce. During his life he was an obscure fourth-century bishop. He is thought to have been from a wealthy family but we do not know under what circumstances he entered the clergy or how he became the archbishop of Myra in what is now Turkey.
That was a turbulent time for the church. In his youth Nicholas was imprisoned during the severe persecutions of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian, and as an archbishop he is thought to have attended the important Council of Nicaea in AD 325 which was held under the newly-Christianized Roman Emperor Constantine. There is no record of his theological views or why he was canonized as a saint although it is believed that he gave away all of the wealth he inherited to charitable causes.
In the centuries after Nicholas’ death his fame grew, and like King Arthur and Robin Hood many dramatic and miraculous legends were attributed to him. Many of those bear an uncanny resemblance to stories about pre-Christian pagan gods, especially the Teutonic god called Hold Nickar, known as Poseidon to the Greeks.
The first written accounts about Saint Nicholas come from several centuries after his death, and by then it was difficult to separate the historical man from the myth. One of the legends attributed to the saint is a well-known story of how he anonymously provided dowries during the night for three young daughters of a down-and-out nobleman. The personality attributed to him was one of kindness and benevolence, especially to children, and by medieval times he was second only to Jesus' mother Mary in the pantheon of saints. (There are more churches dedicated to Saint Nicholas in England than there are to that country's patron, St. George.)
In 1087, a group of sailors stole the saint’s bones from the (then Muslim) town of Myra and brought them to Bari, Italy where a great cathedral was built to house the relics. At about that same time, children in France began to receive anonymous gifts on his feast day, December 6. While many attributed these as being the charitable work of nuns, the children were told that the gifts came from Nicholas, who was children’s patron saint. Over the next four hundred years the phenomenon of December gifts attributed to St. Nicholas spread throughout Europe.
During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century the veneration of saints, however generous they may be, fell out of favor in the Protestant countries of northern Europe. Just as the Catholic missionaries had done centuries earlier, there was a need to reconcile theology with whichever popular customs, beliefs and practices that the reformers could not expect to be successful in ending. There had been no proof that the seasonal gifts had been coming from Nicholas and people began to re-think who the source of the seasonal gifts might be. Many of the above-named distinctive region-specific benefactors were identified.
The newly-authorized local gift-bringers had different personalities and practices (many of which had parallels in ancient Norse and Teutonic mythology.) But they all continued to bestow seasonal largesse on children. In most cases there was a change in the timing of the gifts – they began to arrive on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning.
In Northern Europe, only in the Catholic lowlands of the Netherlands did the gifts continue to arrive on the day sacred to St. Nicholas, and even there the name of the benefactor evolved from St. Nicholas into Sinterklaas. The Dutch Sinterklaas is tall and thin. He is dressed as a bishop, rides Odin’s grey horse Sleipnir, enters houses through chimneys, and is accompanied by a moorish companion, Zwarte Piet (Black Peter).
Initially, the various regional European gift-bringers were thought to also come to children in North America, but before long our own distinctive gift-bringer emerged. While clearly descended from European antecedents, Santa Claus is distinctively different from the Dutch Sinterklaas, the English Father Christmas, or any of the other European benefactors. He has since gone international, and is now, by far, the most ubiquitous gift-bringer in the whole world.
The first reports of this new benefactor were from the Dutch-established state of New York beginning at about the time of the American Revolution, with references to gifts being brought by “Sancte Claus” and “St. A Claus.” In 1823, an account was published that purported to be an actual sighting of the gift-bringer – A Visit from St. Nicholas (now known as The Night before Christmas). It was published anonymously, much as people who encounter UFOs or sasquatches are often reluctant to publicly acknowledge what they see for fear of being thought of as delusional.
Only after much pressure from his family did the author, in 1837, finally reveal himself. It was Clement Clarke Moore, an Episcopal bishop and professor of literature at the General Theological Seminary and a member of the New York Historical Society. In other words, Bishop Moore is not the sort of person who would bear false witness.
Clement Moore described the visitor as looking very different in appearance from either the lean Dutch bishop or the human-scale Santa we are now used to envisioning. Moore describes him as a diminutive “elf”, and he is depicted as an obese fur-clad chain-smoker. Aside from his small size, kindness and a cheerful demeanor appear to have been the visitor's most striking characteristics: “His eyes – how they twinkled! His dimples, how merry!” and “He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf, and I laughed when I saw him in spite of myself.”
Although he explicitly calls the visitor an “elf” his description more resembles a dwarf; the jovial but somewhat impish figures who presided over Teutonic and Norse pagan midwinter festivities. Although Moore was well-educated, he would not necessarily have been able to distinguish between an elf and a dwarf. It is also important to note that in this account the gift-bringer never identifies himself – the author just conjectures that “it must be St. Nick.” Similar accounts of this new magical visitor had been published earlier in 1809 by Washington Irving in his Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York, although Irving never purported to have personally seen the magical fellow.
Further indications of Santa Claus' appearance and lifestyle are provided to us though several portraits drawn by the German-born illustrator Thomas Nast which were published in the political magazine Harper's Weekly from 1862 to 1886. Nast's portrayals of Santa largely coincide with Moore's description, although there is some evolution over time. But as with Moore’s eyewitness description, Nast’s portrayals more resemble a dwarf than a human.
He also fleshes out many details: For example, it was through Nast that we learned that Santa has a North Pole workshop (actually, as you will read below it is more likely to be in Lapland) with other elves (or dwarfs) as his toy-making assistants, that he is amenable to receiving letters from children that indicate their gift preferences, and that he appreciates having snacks left out for him.
While Moore depicts an entirely non-judgmental gift-bringer, Thomas Nast's illustrations hint at parallels to some of his European counterparts who bring both rewards and punishments. Nast shows Santa maintaining a list of good and bad children and watching their activities, although it is not clear how children's behavior affects his generosity towards them.
Most depictions seem to suggest that that Santa brings gifts to all children, and Nast never depicted Santa as meting out punishment or delivering undesirable gifts to bad children. In The Night Before Christmas Moore described the visitor as filling all of the stockings, and children’s usual experience has been that everyone receives gifts from Santa whether or not they have been particularly good. But traditionally many of the European gift-bringers could be very judgmental indeed!
Nast went to his grave never divulging how he got such intimate access to the elusive gift-bringer.
It is a well-known fact that department store Santas, and now shopping mall Santas, are impersonators rather than the real thing. They have training schools and their own professional association. The first department store Santa Claus appeared at the J.W. Parkinson's store in Philadelphia in 1841, but they did not become commonplace until the 1890s when the department store Santas began to invite children to sit on their laps and tell him what they wanted for Christmas.
Initially there was little standardization in the department store Santas' dress and appearance, but by 1920 they all closely resembled the now-familiar appearance and wore the now-familiar garments.
Naturally, these hired impostors are all human. The ideal department store Santa would be a plump middle-aged or older man, possessing his own (white) beard and ruddy complexion, and have an ability to charm/tolerate children as well as pass a police record check. This became the basis for images of him that illustrator Haddon Sundblom made for Coca Cola advertisements every year from 1931 to 1964. The human-scale Santa in Sundblom’s advertisement paintings, derived from the department store impersonators, has been extremely influential in shaping our current expectations about Santa’s appearance.
Other illustrators copied his lead, including Norman Rockwell and Joseph Leyendecker of the Saturday Evening Post, Thus, it is the stereotype of the ideal department store Santa, rather than the elusive gift-bringer, that we see in popular culture. This might explain the impractical costume in the illustrations.
I can find no authoritative source for Santa Claus having a wife. None of Santa's European counterparts have spouses, and she is not shown in any of Nast's portraits of Santa's life at the “North Pole.” She is shown in some illustrations for children's books, almost always as a grandmotherly human homemaker in the background baking cookies. She is so one-dimensional and spiritless that I am reasonably sure that she is a fabricated character.
The reindeer are better documented. Flying “miniature reindeer” are described in Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas. It is unclear how he could fabricate such a means for propulsion for Santa's sleigh: Moore would never have seen a reindeer – they were unknown in 1820s New York and they have no counterpart among the European gift-bringers or in mythology.
Furthermore, reindeer are not used as draft animals except in rare instances in Lapland and Siberia, and it is unlikely that Moore would have had access to any ethnographic accounts of those remote locations. All of this tends to add credence to Moore’s account having been based on an actual sighting.
It is unfortunate that the character Rudolf has assumed such a ubiquitous presence in popular accounts of Santa's transportation system since he is well-documented to be entirely fictional. His creator, Robert Lewis May, admitted that he invented Rudolf based upon his own childhood traumas and fantasies.
In 1939 Montgomery Ward department stores distributed a free children's book that May had written that told the now-familiar story of how a misfit young reindeer with a neon nose became a Christmas hero. In 1947 the company gave permission for May’s brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, to use the then-out-of-print fictional character in a song. Gene Autry’s commercial success with the song in 1949 (which rose to the top of the pop charts and sold over 2 million records in the first year alone!) has led to numerous other attempts to introduce fictional characters into the Santa Claus canon.
If there were to be a reindeer with a red nose, according to Prof. Odd Halvorsen of the University of Oslo the cause would likely be blood oozing from a parasitic infection of Rudolf's respiratory system. That would greatly weaken him, and would at least be a plausible explanation for the other reindeer shunning him. Such an infection is highly contagious.
Reindeer are uniquely suited for arctic conditions. Their noses have elaborately folded turbinal bones covered with blood-rich membranes which warm the air when they breathe in, and recapture the warmth as they breathe out. Unfortunately, this creates a perfect environment not only for the usual parasites that prey upon ruminates but also twenty other types of them that are specific to reindeer.
However, there is no known circumstance under which this would create sufficient redness as to provide illumination. And as anyone knows who has tried to drive in the snow or fog with high beams on, a bright light at the front of the reindeer team is very unlikely to be useful for navigation.
But back to Santa himself. 20th century illustrators all depict a nattily-dressed Santa in red velvet or satin, with white fur trim and a wide belt and matching boots. He is invariably shown with a distinctive pompom-topped stocking cap, and he never, ever, smokes a pipe. Most importantly, he now assumes human proportions and is neither elfish nor dwarfish.
That makes it hard to believe in Santa. One can readily imagine a tiny sleigh pulled by miniature reindeer landing softly on a roof to bring a diminutive figure to distribute Christmas largesse. It is much more difficult to envision a team of eight full-sized reindeer and a full-size sleigh with a 120 kilogram human landing sufficiently quietly not to wake up the entire household. I think that it is fairly clear that Santa Claus cannot be the size of a human and therefore must be a supernatural creature.
In his 1823 eyewitness account Moore called the character he saw an elf but he describes a dwarf. Elves and dwarfs are well-documented in Teutonic and Norse mythology and they can be either male or female. They are among the longest-living species on Earth and their long lives makes them cautious – they have a lot to lose by making thoughtless choices. Both of their cultures are therefore very conservative and they are notoriously secretive.
Both elves and dwarfs are renowned for their handcrafting and creative abilities. Of the two, dwarfs have a higher propensity for working indoors and a stronger work ethic.
They both have a natural affinity for magic, and they remain on good terms with pixies, fairies, gnomes and other magical creatures. But they have a more tenuous relationship with humans who often view them as troublesome, mischievous creatures. This is partly due to their tendency to show little tolerance for bad human behavior, although both of these magical races are also known for exhibiting generosity when it is deserved.
Given elves’ and dwarfs’ propensity for secretiveness it is not surprising that many mysteries surround the location of Santa’s home base and workshop. It must be a very large facility with accommodation for Santa and his all of his assistants, stabling and pasture for the reindeer, a large manufacturing complex (quaintly called Santa’s “workshop”) along with attendant warehousing and other facilities.
Traditionally this home base is identified as being at the north pole. However, this cannot be a reference to the geographic north pole, which is on a constantly drifting sheet of ice subject to seasonal breakups. Until a few years ago the magnetic north pole was on the remote Canadian Ellesmere Island, but this too is an unpromising location even assuming magical capabilities to cloak Santa’s home base in invisibility. It is more likely that “north pole” is a code name, or a misdirection to help keep the location secret.
A better candidate for its location was identified by Markus Rautio as far back as 1927. He postulated that the hideout was located in the mountains and spruce forests of Korvatunturi on the eastern frontier of Lapland, Finland’s northernmost province. This location near the Arctic Circle would be familiar territory for elves, dwarfs, and reindeer, with seclusion from inquisitive humans and plenty of space for grazing. Even today, there are no road approaches to this remote location, and the area has never been fully explored although it is sparsely inhabited by the reindeer-herding native Sámi people.
The traditional image is that Santa is in charge of all aspects of the enormous annual Christmas campaign. There is no evidence for this. To the extent that Santa has any visibility at all in his activities (and we all know how scanty that evidence is!) it is entirely on the distribution side of the operation. It is possible that there is more specialization than we realize, and that another character who is even more publicity-shy than Santa is responsible for manufacturing. In fact, although it seems like heresy to say so, it is even possible that Santa isn’t the CEO of Christmas but merely its delivery guy. However, that is just my own speculation.
In old Norse tradition, crossbreeding was possible between elves and humans. A human queen who had an elvish lover bore the hero Högni, and an elf-woman who was raped by Helgi bore Skuld. The saga of Hrolf Kraki adds that since Skuld was half-elfin she was very skilled in magic, to the point that she was almost invincible in battle.
Human/elf crosses are also found in the Heimskringla and in the Saga of Thorstein which give accounts of a line of local kings who ruled over Álfheim. Similarly, Germanic and Norse mythology recognizes cross-breeding between dwarfs and humans.
It should be noted that there have never been any claims that Santa ever fathered any offspring – a rather remarkable fact in these days of celebrity paternity lawsuits. However, to be fair, cross-breeding could be a possible explanation for the difference in appearance between the diminutive dwarf-like Santa in the 19th century depictions and the human appearance of Santa in 20th century popular culture, since there is no clear evidence that the Santa of today is the same individual as the gift-bringer of previous generations.
Identifying Santa Claus as an elf or dwarf from the remote sub-arctic forests of Lapland provides an explanation for other matters. The reindeer-herding native Sámi people of Lapland are culturally descended from the ancient Norse. These same people hold Polaris, the star directly above the north pole, to be sacred since all other stars revolve around it.
The Sámi traditionally hold the psychedelic mushroom Fly Agaric (amanita muscaria) in very high regard. The mushrooms are used for both ritual and recreational purposes during the long arctic midwinter nights. Reindeer are also fond of eating amanita mushrooms; they will seek them out then prance about while under their influence.
The effects of consuming amanita mushrooms for humans include sensations of flying. It is not known what hallucinations reindeer experience from their consumption, or what effects they may have on their physiology.
The tops of the fly agaric mushrooms are bright red, with shaggy white spots. Since the mushrooms are highly toxic in their natural state they are harvested and prepared only by a shaman. To this day, Sámi shamans dress in ceremonial red coats with white fur trim when gathering and delivering the magic mushrooms.
In traditional times, when the snow was deep in midwinter, the shaman would enter the Sámi people’s yurts to deliver the magic mushrooms through the smoke-hole in the roof, and the people would dry them in stockings hanging near the warmth of the hearth-fire.
One particular time when the Sámi people have traditionally indulged in the hallucinogenic mushrooms for ritualistic purposes was the morning of the winter solstice. One of the side effects of eating amanita mushrooms is that the skin and facial features take on a flushed, ruddy glow, and they give users manic bursts of energy. Moore describes the elf as being “lively and quick” and “His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry.” Santa's jolly "Ho, ho, ho!" resembles the euphoric laugh of one who has indulged in the magic fungus.
[Note that neither Clement Moore nor Thomas Nast would have known about Sámi shamans and customs when they produced their depictions of the gift-bringer in the 19th century.]
The emergence of Santa Claus in the early 19th century coincided with a need to return family values to the midwinter festive season. In Puritan England the celebration of Christmas had been banned for reasons of religious dogma. As with prohibition of alcohol in the early 20th century, prohibition of Christmas had had unexpected consequences. It proved unsuccessful in that it did little to stop most people from having seasonal celebrations, but it did deprive the holiday of its spiritual, charitable and social meaning and values.
In the 17th and 18th century the holiday season became a time of alcohol-fueled revelry and anti-social behavior in the streets by those who mocked the law, and it was a joyless time for those who did chose to follow the legal and religious proscription. In the early 19th century, a movement began in both England and North America to “keep Christmas” as a time of religious observation of the holiday and family-oriented celebration.
The Royal Family introduced the German Christmas tree custom to England, and from there it spread to America. Writers like Charles Dickens and Washington Irving actively promoted a romantic, nostalgic image of Christmas as a season of generosity and family-centered celebration. In England, Father Christmas returned from exile and here in North America our new gift-bringer with ancient roots emerged.
When we grow up we learn that there is no Santa Claus – that our parents are the source of all of the generosity that had been attributed to the magical gift-bringer. The principle beneficiary of this perspective would appear to be the parents who tell us this. They then they receive the credit from grateful children.
However actually, Santa is the principle beneficiary of the fact that parents (and the young future-parents) don't believe in him. Parents who do not believe in Santa give gifts to the children on his behalf, and therefore he does not need to do so. That significantly cuts down on the work-load. He can focus his energies on fulfilling the wishes of the relatively few children who have parents who do believe in Santa.
With a world population now exceeding 8 billion people, without non-believing parents Santa's job would not be manageable. I am not suggesting that Santa is behind a conspiracy to not believe in him, but he certainly benefits from the pervasiveness of this non-belief. It is also consistent with the mischievous nature of elves and dwarfs that Santa they would allow such non-belief to become commonplace.
My final proof is a published reply to an 1897 letter to the editor of the New York newspaper The Sun:
Dear Editor,I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say that there is no Santa Claus. Papa says "If you see it in The Sun, it is so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.
There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. … Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. …
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”
Written by Francis Church, September 21, 1897
