Virginia O’Hanlon
The first titular character in this work is Virginia O’Hanlon, who at the time was the eight-year-old daughter Philip O’Hanlon, an assistant to the coroner in New York City. The curious but skeptical daughter had made inquiries to her father over the legitimacy of the existence of Santa Claus. As the legend goes, father advised daughter to write to one of the city’s many newspapers operating at the time and among its most successful, The Sun, because, according to him, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.”
Francis B. Church
Francis B. Church was the editor who responded to the little girl’s inquiry. Church was already a very popular editorial columnist with the newspaper who, rather ironically, was best-known for writing acidic and cynical opinion pieces about religious faith and superstitious beliefs. Because of this disconnect, he was initially reluctant to attach his name to the response to Virginia’s letter which became not just his most famous, but the most reprinted editorial column in American history.
Santa Claus
The second titular figure is obviously one of the most recognized names in modern history. Notably, however, Church’s editorial reply does not actually treat Santa as the mythic individual we all recognize. Santa Claus becomes, instead, a cleverly manipulated metaphor of propaganda that embodies—and there is simply no getting around this—all those positive ideological attributes commonly associated with Jesus Christ. It is in this element of the reply that the only note of Church’s typical view of Christian faith pops up among the atypically idealism marking the rest of the piece.
