Yes, Dakota, There is a Santa Claus

We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Leader & The NEWSpaper:

Dear Editor—

I am 4 years old. Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus. Mom says, “If you see it in the paper, it must be true.” Please be honest, is there a Santa Claus?

Dakota Williams

Dakota, I think that your little friends are mean, insensitive, snot-nosed little bullies. Kids today are in too much of a hurry to grow up. Their older brothers and sisters tell them that it’s not “cool” to believe in Santa and make them feel like their babies if they do. As a result, they have to make them feel better by picking on other little kids like you. Everyone likes to feel important, and unfortunately, everyone likes to feel powerful. I wish that we could all feel important and loved because God made each one of us and has a purpose in mind for each of us, but unfortunately our shallow, decadent materialistic society and the amoral, market-driven media have conditioned us all to believe that there are pretty much only three or four things that make us valuable. For poor folk, its survival skills, either you’re sexy or you’re aggressive. For middle-class folk it’s pretty much all about how much stuff you have. And for wealthy folks, its all about how much influence you wield. Basically, no matter who you are, we all like to think that we are the center of our own universe.

Yes, Dakota, there is a Santa Claus. I wish I could tell you that he exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, but you know, those are things that sometimes seem to be in short supply these days. Alas! how dreary our world has become, because the icon of Santa Claus is misused as an advertising ploy. Or as a threat and a bribe to get little kids like you to obey. Or as a politically-correct, sanitized, homogenized symbol to be used in place of religious ones so that we can celebrate “something” without offending anyone by celebrating the birth of Christ, whom Saint Nicholas of Patara served, followed and strove to emulate.

It’s like when you find out that a star athlete that you once admired uses steroids or when a politician you placed hopes in breaks his campaign promises or when an anti-establishment band you listened too sold their songs to an advertising agency to use in a commercial. Or when readers find out that a character in a piece of journalism is actually a composite character, or fictional all together, like you, Dakota (oops!)

Thank God there are still little kids like you- full of wonder and excitement this time of year to prove to us that there is still childlike faith, poetry, and romance to make this existence tolerable.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in Spider Man. Go ahead and set up a webcam to monitor your chimney on Christmas eve to catch Santa, but even if you don’t see Santa Claus, what would that prove? The whole point of magic is that it defies explanation and sneaks around any empirical evidence we can compile. As Shakespeare put it in his play Hamlet, "there are more things... under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Dakota, if you haven’t seen the wonderful animated film, “The Polar Express,” based on the 1985 book by Chris Van Allsburg, you really should. I was a curmudgeon this year, an old Ebeneezer Scrooge who didn’t want to even hear any Christmas music until I watched this movie with my children. It melted my cold, cynical heart so that the Christmas spirit could come in and warm my soul.

In the Polar Express, a little boy is beginning to doubt that Santa exists. Once he meets Santa at the North Pole he is given a chance to ask Santa for anything he wants. All he asks for is one jingle bell from Santa’s sleigh. The only people who can hear the bell ring, are those who believe in Santa. Just because your friends or many adults can not hear the bell ring, does not mean that it doesn’t continue to ring.

I think that the Editor at the New York Sun who wrote another little girl, named Virginia, put it much more eloquently than I can when he wrote:

“You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.”

“No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”