By Charles Meyerson
I'd run the scenario through my mind hundreds of times. I was
certain I'd be ready when the moment came.
But when the fateful question emerged, I panicked.
"Daddy, is Santa Claus real?"
I'd heard similar questions before and parried them with ease:
"Do you believe in Santa, Daddy?" he'd asked.
"Do you?" I'd replied. He'd say yes, and that had been that.
But where the Socratic method was enough to sidetrack him a few weeks
ago, it didn't seem to work with a question fired point-blank.
"Is Santa Claus real?" The only retort that bubbled to the surface of
my feverish brain was the totally inadequate "Are you?"
I mumbled something like "I've seen a lot of people I thought
were Santa Claus." But that was a dead-end, so I excused myself and
scurried downstairs to consult the family's real expert on Santa:
Mommy.
"Ask him if he believes," she said.
"Too late in the conversation for that," I said.
"Tell him you've never seen Santa personally," she recommended.
"No good," I said. "That'll leave him wondering who he's been
visiting all these years." Besides: his younger brother was in the room
with him.
"Then lie," she said.
But I'm a terrible liar. And I wasn't ready to sign off on the end
of innocence for our first-born.
So I returned to the bedroom with a book from my childhood.
"Almost a hundred years ago," I explained, "a little girl asked the
same question in a letter to the editor of a New York newspaper. Brush
your teeth and get into your jammies, and I'll read you her letter and
one of the best answers ever written to the question you asked me."
The brushing and dressing went remarkably quickly, and soon we were
all jammed into bed.
And I read the words eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlow wrote to the
New York Sun in 1897:
Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus.... Please tell me
the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
And I read the inspired answer from the paper's editor, Charles Dana:
"Your little friends...have been affected by the skepticism of a
skeptical age.
"The most real things in the world are those that neither children
nor men can see....
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as
love and generosity and devotion exist....
"He lives and 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."
Dana may have been right. Maybe he was wrong.
But the important thing is that, by the time I was done reading his
answer, the kids had forgotten the question.
So Santa makes glad the heart of childhood in this home...for at
least one Christmas more.