Francis Pharcellus Church, the man who answered Virginia's simple query about Santa Claus
This is a bit of an encore post, from 2007. Merry Christmas.
Is this the man who really saved Santa Claus?
The Newseum itself doesn’t open until opened in the autumn of 2007, but some exhibits are already up, were online earlier. Important ones.
Among other things already up is this explanation for the 1897 editorial in The New York Sun, with the famous line: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” It is “history’s most reprinted editorial,” the Newseum says.
While you’re there, look at other exhibits already in place. This is a good source for kids’ reports and for teachers’ lectures.
Update: Parallel Divergence is at it again (remember the “how Hubble killed God?”) Here it is: “How Google Earth Killed Santa Claus.”
Update May 2007: Coverage of the Newseum’s pending opening.
Update December 2008: More on the Sun editorial
And about angels:
- Paul Crume’s column on angels, originally published in his front page column in the Dallas Morning News, now runs annually — now on the editorial page. Some years I think it’s drivel, some years it moves me greatly, though the words are the same every year.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
There is many country where Santa exist, Yes i know this is absurd, but children…
LikeLike
Whenever I read about this column I always think of Terry Pratchett’s novel Hogfather, about a winter solstice holiday on another planet. At one point a governess is asked by Twyla, one of her charges, whether the Hogfather really exists. Here is her reply (ellipses in the original):
“Wherever people are obtuse and absurd, and wherever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach,,,and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as much grasp of the realities of the physical universe as an oyster has of mountaineering … yes, Twyla: there is a Hogfather.”
LikeLike