(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Santa Claus. He carries a lot of baggage, including the believability question answered firmly in a newspaper editorial nearly 125 years ago.
On this week, in 1968, WBBM Newsradio aired an interview with Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas, who had written to a New York newspaper as a little girl, asking if Santa was real. She received a response that is among the most famous of Christmas:
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
WBBM news personality Mal Bellairs revisited the tale on Christmas Eve 52 years ago and actually interviewed THE Virginia.
The broadcaster’s son, Rick, said this story “was one of the interviews that my dad cherished over the years.”
Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas was 79 when she talked to the elder Bellairs and offered the backstory to her famous letter. She said the question about whether Santa is real had come up with her and other girls in their New York neighborhood. They expressed doubt about his existence.
“I still felt in need of confirmation, and so it was then that I asked my father,” O’Hanlon Douglas said in the interview.
She said her father was a “bit evasive,” so she wrote a letter to the editor of the Sun in 1897.
“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age,” replied the editorial, which was written by Francis Church.
Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas died in 1971.
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