It is the gift that many newspaper editors give themselves, and some of their writers, just about every year.
We need one less thing to worry about during a season of staff days off, moved-up deadlines and readers who are are in no mood to read serious commentary on weighty matters of public affairs — if they are interested in reading anything at all. So it has become a ritual at this and many other American newspapers to reprint, on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, an editorial in praise of a fictional character that appeared in a long-defunct newspaper 120 years ago.
To be reproduced in the Dec. 24 Tribune this year, the editorial known the world over for the phrase, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” was a bit of extemporania almost hidden in the middle of an exceptionally grey page of newsprint. It was stuck in among serious commentaries on such things as maritime law, elections in Connecticut and the new invention called a “chainless bicycle” — on Sept. 21, 1897.
Its anonymous author was later revealed to be one Francis Pharcellus Church, an editorial writer for The New York Sun. According to lore, the former Civil War correspondent, left cynical and depressed by all the suffering he had witnessed, was not happy that his editor assigned him to answer a question that had not even been directed at the editorial page, but addressed by 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon to the Sun’s irregular Q&A column. He knocked it out in a day, we are told, and seldom spoke of it afterward.
As explained in a 2005 journalism trade magazine article by scholar W. Joseph Campbell, the editorial was not thought to be that big a deal at the time, at least not by the newspaper itself.
The essay did not instantly become the “A Charlie Brown Christmas” of its age, dragged out every solstice season as a national version of a family tradition. It took 10 years of requests from readers before the editorial reappeared in The Sun, and it wasn’t until the 1920s that it became a regular Yule tradition.
There are many reasons, other than the laziness of newspaper editors, for the piece’s endurance. Like much of the rest of the festivities surrounding Christmas, it centers on a child and a child’s sense of wonder. Even though Santa’s role in the celebration of the holiday has become the personification of acquisitiveness — What did Santa bring you? — Church’s editorial doesn’t seek to promote greed or make children feel as though their worth as a human being is tied to, and reflected in, the number of expensive gifts they receive.
He manages to make it a reflection on wonder and a regret that people don’t feel as much of it as they used to. Church complains about living in “a skeptical age” (though skepticism is generally considered a virtue for journalists) and encourages little Virginia to resist the whispers of her childhood friends, to push back against society’s pull to stop believing in things not seen.
“They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds,” Church wrote. “All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little.”
Some minds, of course, are littler than others. But all of us gain from knowing how little we know.
Last week in this space, I talked up the moral and practical value of a traditional, even classical, liberal arts education. Not for everyone, or every need, is the science-and-technology based education that draws pledges of the most money.
One online comment appended to that article suggested that more people should read The Apology of Plato, a report of what the great philosopher Socrates had argued at his trial in ancient Athens. The nut of it is that Socrates once resisted the talk of many others that he was an extremely smart man, but came to accept the description because all the other supposedly smart men he talked with were convinced that they knew everything worth knowing, while Socrates alone was aware that his knowledge was seriously limited.
And knowing that, he said, meant he knew as much as anyone and more than most.
All minds, Virginia, are little.
Merry Christmas.
George Pyle, The Tribune’s editorial page editor, thinks he will run this column every Christmas for the rest of his life, and beyond. gpyle@sltrib.com.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tribune staff. George Pyle.