About 120 years ago – an age when newspapers were less reliable but more trusted – The Sun newspaper in New York answered a young girl’s most pressing question: Is there a Santa Claus?
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” the anonymous editor assured the eight-year-old child. “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion.”
The writer explained that Virginia’s doubting friends were “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.”
Despite our usual tendency to side with Virginia’s friends, we admit that the height of the holiday season seems like the wrong time to badger Justin Trudeau about proportional representation or John Horgan about Site C. But it does feel like the right time to discuss skepticism.
In our age of Twitter bots and automated social media accounts that use artificial intelligence to spread lies and other covfefe at the speed of thought, it’s almost impossible to be overly skeptical. Almost, that is, because there is something about Dec. 25 that transcends skepticism. It’s the time of year that compelled pagans to pay tribute to Saturn. It’s the season that urged the law abiding pilgrims of New England to flout a Puritan law forbidding the observance of Christmas.
It’s Christmas, Yalda, Hanukkah and Yule. It’s the return of the sun.
But for almost all of us Dec. 25 is a day of belief; a time to believe in kindness and peace as well as the hope the world we’ve created can become the world we want our children to have.
So for any Virginias who find themselves at the intersection of faith and doubt, yes, we assure you there’s still magic out there. But most of it’s in you.
