IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?

Reflecting on a comment from Ian Bowater on the gullibility of Indian Tribes, I think there is something in the character of the American citizen that permits her/him to express wonderment about the most straightforward and indisputable facts of life. This characteristic is most often pointed out by European intellectuals and writers, as well as some American intellectuals and writers who have been heavily influenced by European society. These are usually expatriates who spend some time living ‘abroad’, usually in England. Consider Henry James, Edith Wharton, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress; although in Twain’s case there is also, aside form the naïve, a quality of the canny and down to earth New Englander. Twain had little time for European class ‘society’; however, on the whole, the American citizen maintains a degree of guilelessness. It is not necessary that s/he be born and bred in America, merely living there for a short time and it seeps into the brain like some form of osmosis. Perhaps it’s something in the water? I include most of the North American continent in this attribute.

In keeping with my general theme, I noticed the following item. Is There a Santa Claus? was the title of an editorial appearing 114 year ago, today,  in the September 21, 1897 edition of The New York Sun. The editorial, which included the famous reply "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus", has become an indelible part of popular Christmas folklore in the United States and Canada.

In 1897, Dr. Philip O'Hanlon, a coroner's assistant on Manhattan's Upper West Side, was asked by his then eight-year-old daughter, Virginia (1889–1971), whether Santa Claus really existed. She had begun to doubt there was a Santa Claus, because her friends had told her that he did not exist.

Dr. O’Hanlon suggested she write to The Sun, a prominent New York City newspaper at the time, assuring her that "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." He unwittingly gave one of the paper's editors, Francis Pharcellus Church an opportunity to rise above the simple question and address the philosophical issues behind it.

The Sun was a New York newspaper that was published from 1833 until 1950. It was considered a serious paper, like the city's two more successful broadsheets, The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. The Sun was the most politically conservative of the three.

In replying Yes There is a Santa Claus, Church added, “ 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…You might as well not believe in fairies…The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see…Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.”

Tolkein 1916

It was 140 years later, that on the 21^st September 1937, that J.R.R.Tolkein’s The Hobbit was published. The British have always believed in fairies, but not in a naïve way, more of a display of eccentricity. But…

Five years on from that, on the 21^st September 1942, a World War was raging. The B-29 Superfortress made its maiden flight; whilst to celebrate Yom Kippur, on this day in 1942, the Nazis sent 1000 Jews of Pidhaytsi in the West Ukrain to Belzec extermination camp, they ordered the permanent evacuation of Konstantynow to the Ghetto in Biala Podlaska (established to assemble all Jews from the nearby towns) and in Dunaivtsi, Ukraine, they murdered 2,588 Jews.

Twenty two years later, on the 21^st September 1964, the North American XB-70 Valkyrie, the world’s first Mach 3 bomber, made its maiden flight from Palmdale, California.

I guess some stopped believing that “love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.”