A Quote From ....

Yes, Virginia

In 1897, eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote to the editor of the New York Sun, to ask if it were true that, as some of her friends were saying, there was no Santa Claus. The Editor of the paper, Francis Pharcellus Church, replied simply, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus". He developed the theme over five paragraphs of his editorial, but it is the opening words which remain in our quotations vocabulary today. (Chico Marx as Fiorello in A Night at the Opera puts the contrary view in refusing to believe in the existence of a sanity clause: "You can't fool me. There ain't no Sanity Claus".)

Virginia was perhaps fortunate in the recipient of her letter. Ebenezer Scrooge, for example, at least in his unregenerate days, would have responded with equal simplicity but less sympathy, "Bah, humbug!". W. C. Fields also approached the celebration cautiously: "A Merry Christmas to all my friends except two", and the Grossmiths' Mr Pooter was definitely unhappy: "I am a poor man, but I would happily give ten shillings to find out who sent me the insulting Christmas card I received this morning". In our own time, P. J. O'Rourke assessed the costs of celebration: "Christmas begins about the first of December with an office party and ends when you finally realize what you spent, around April fifteenth of the next year". Alan Rickman's villainous Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1991 film "Robin Hood" gave the order "And call off Christmas!" as the culmination of a list of repressive measures.

In the end, however, many people would probably agree with Nigel Molesworth, who on balance saw advantage in the festival: "Still xmas is a good time with all those presents and good food and i hope it will never die out or at any rate until i am grown up and hav to pay for it all".

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