Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

In all the years I've been watching Christmas television specials, I've heard recited, more times than I can count, the letter written by eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon to the editor of the New York Sun, asking if Santa Claus was real. (Just this week, I've seen it in two programs from the 1960s.) The response by the Sun's editor, Francis Pharcellus Church, which was published on September 21, 1897, is today considered one of the greatest, and most famous, essays in the history of American journalism. I imagine most of you have seen this a time or three yourselves.

How many of you, though, have actually seen the letter read by the very same Virginia? Here she is, reading it to a group of children sometime before her death in 1971. 

  
It really is a remarkable moment, when you consider that this letter was written just 32 years after the end of the Civil War, before the Wright Brothers made their flight. Depending on when this was filmed, we were on the verge of placing a man on the moon when she read this letter. It's a remarkable piece of American folklore, and even more remarkable that we have Virginia herself reading the letter on film. TV

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