by Jeff Guinn
“They wouldn’t all fit,” Leonardo said helpfully. He didn’t understand sarcasm; many scientists don’t. “If you really want to have all of them flying with the reindeer at once, I’ll have to build a much larger sleigh, and carve bigger wings for the sleigh and the reindeer.”
Layla looked up from a book she was reading and said, “At least most newspapers and magazines aren’t against us, Ben. Why, many of them publish lovely stories about Santa, and Thomas Nast at the Harper’s Weekly draws those wonderful Santa cartoons.”
“I don’t think they’re wonderful,” I grumbled. “He makes me look too fat, and he draws me the size of an elf instead of a man.”
“Blame Clement Moore for that,” Layla reminded me. “He called you an elf in his poem.”
“That’s no excuse,” I replied, irritated at the thought. Not only were Nast’s cartoons unflattering about my height and weight, they had proven so popular with readers that, all across America, anyone familiar with them assumed this was exactly the way I looked. Worse, except for the height, Layla and the others kept insisting that was the way I did look.
“Let’s get back to the adults who no longer believe,” Felix urged. “Many of these adults are fathers and mothers. When they have doubts about Santa, those doubts are often shared with their children. And that, my friends, is a disgrace! To think that some children no longer believe in Santa Claus! Something has to be done!”
We tried to calm Ben and Felix down, reminding them that many grown-ups, far from disbelieving, were doing their best to contribute to universal holiday good spirits.
“Remember Ralph E. Morris of the New England Telephone Company?” Layla asked. “He’s the one who looked at those strings of electric lights on telephone switchboards and suggested they be hung on Christmas trees. Those make such a nice display! And there’s that police commissioner in New York City—what was his name?”
“Theodore Roosevelt,” Leonardo said, looking up for a moment from a diagram he was drawing in a notebook. I glanced at the diagram, which was of a giant sleigh. Apparently Leonardo was getting ready just in case we did decide to take all the adults in America on a ride through the sky with our reindeer.
“Yes, Commissioner Roosevelt,” Layla continued. “During the Christmas season he likes to go out in the city streets and lead carolers in singing that new song, ‘One Horse Open Sleigh,’ that many prefer to call ‘Jingle Bells.’ And, of course, there’s Thomas Nast.”
“Nast’s cartoons are ridiculous,” Felix snapped.
“Because they make me look short and fat?” I asked hopefully.
“No, because the man draws us living at the North Pole!” Felix replied. “Isn’t that the most foolish thing? Nobody’s even been able to reach the North Pole. Robert Peary’s tried and failed. I think Nast and all the doubting adults ought to be sent there. A little snow and ice might do them good. No one could live at the North Pole!”
“Oh, I think I could,” Leonardo said quickly. “In fact, I have a diagram here that shows how—”
“Later, please, Leonardo,” Felix interrupted. “Santa, what can we do to make everyone believe in you again?”
“I don’t think we can do anything, Felix,” I answered softly. “I can’t go out and fly my sleigh in front of every doubting grown-up and child in America. Even with our powers, there’s just not enough time. If it’s meant for these disbelievers to start believing again, someone else will have to make them do it for us.”
Just a year later, someone did. Two someones, really.
The first someone was an eight-year-old girl named Virginia O‘Hanlon, who lived in New York with her parents. Virginia’s father considered himself a man of science. He was a doctor who sometimes advised Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt and the rest of the New York City Police Department. Dr. O’Hanlon decided there wasn’t any Santa Claus, although I had personally come to his house on several Christmas Eves to leave presents in Virginia’s stocking. Perhaps Dr. O‘Hanlon didn’t talk much to Mrs. O’Hanlon, and thought she left the gifts for their daughter. In any event, some of Virginia’s friends at school wondered out loud if there really was a Santa Claus, and when she got home that afternoon she asked her father whether or not I was real.
Dr. O’Hanlon wasn’t an evil man, just a skeptical one. Although he no longer believed in me, he didn’t want to make Virginia sad. So he suggested she write a letter to the “Question and Answer” section editor of the New York Sun newspaper asking him if I existed. I don’t think he ever expected Virginia to write that letter, but she did.
Virginia’s letter read:Dear Editor:
I am eight years old, and some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?”
Virginia O’Hanlon
Now, the “Question and Answer” editor of the New York Sun was a man named Francis Church. Mr. Church had once been a famous reporter, but now he had what the newspaper considered an unimportant job. Sometimes Mr. Church answered questions in ways that made readers of the Sun very angry. It’s possible he didn’t like his job very much at all.
But Francis Church did love Christmas, and he did believe in me. Maybe it was the marbles I’d left for him one Christmas Eve when he was a boy. In any event, on September 21, 1897, Mr. Church printed Virginia’s letter and his answer to it right on the editorial page of his newspaper, where untold thousands of people read them.
Mr. Church’s reply was so perfect I found myself wondering if Felix and Ben Franklin might have written it for him. It began:Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe, except they see ...
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know how they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would the world be if there were no Santa Claus.... You might get your papa to hire men to watch all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see...
No Santa Claus? Thank God, he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
I don’t know if Virginia cried when she read Mr. Church’s answer to her letter, but I certainly did. I cried with joy, because I knew anyone reading those beautiful words would believe in me again and never stop believing in me anymore. The editors at the Sun must have thought so, too, because they reprinted Virginia’s letter and Mr. Church’s reply every Christmas season for the next fifty-two years, until the paper was finally closed down.
Virginia herself became a teacher, and a very good one, who always told her students they should believe in me. After teaching in public schools for a while, she taught in a school for children who were very, very sick. Virginia’s special pupils there were always visited by me or my helpers on Christmas Eve.
Of course, I’d long had a rule about giving my gifts only to children, not grown-ups, but I decided to make one exception. On Christmas morning 1897, Mr. Church awoke to find the finest set of marbles ever made had been left in a new stocking tacked up by his fireplace. There was also a note that said simply, “Thank you. Love, Santa.”
That same Christmas morning found Layla, Ben Franklin, Leonardo, Felix, and me back at the Cooperstown farmhouse, worn out from our gift-giving activities of the night before. As we sipped cocoa before enjoying some well-earned sleep, Ben commented, “I truly believe that letter from Virginia and Mr. Church’s answer may have done the trick! More children than ever believe in you, Santa.”
“And though that’s a problem we’re glad to have, it’s still a problem,” Felix noted. “It soon will be impossible to keep
track of all the children who believe in you, and all those children must get presents. It’s awkward being so far away from our friends in Yellowstone National Park, from Arthur and Francis in London, and from Attila and Dorothea in Nuremberg. It would be so much more efficient if we could all work together in one place. But I wonder, where could that place be?”
“Thomas Nast has shown us,” Leonardo blurted. “Do you have time to listen to me now? In Nast’s cartoons, Santa lives at the North Pole, and for the reasons I’m about to share with you, I think the North Pole would be perfect....”
“Santa Claus! Bully!” the president blurted, peering at me from behind tiny, round-lensed eyeglasses. At first I was offended, thinking he was accusing me of picking on someone, but then I remembered that “bully” was his favorite expression of excitement and pleasure.
TWENTY-THREE
Theodore Roosevelt and Our North Pole Home
In the late 1800s, the North Pole seemed like a very mysterious place. Everyone knew it existed, but no one had ever been there. It was the absolute top of the Earth, a region of snow and wind and bitter cold, scientists said, destined by its unique location to have months where the sun would not shine at all, followed by six months of constant sunlight. When he drew his cartoons of Santa living there, Thomas Nast thought it was a joke. But Leonardo da Vinci didn’t.
“Consider the location, Santa Claus,” Leonardo pleaded with me during early 1898, just a few months after Virginia O’Hanlon’s letter to the New York Sun inspired new widespread belief in me. “The number of children we must serve grows every year. We can’t continue to have some of our helpers in one place and some in another. Besides, it’s becoming harder to keep the locations of our toy factories and reindeer barn secret. With so many people around, there’s less privacy. At the North Pole we could all work together again as one team, and few, if any, visitors would disturb us.”
“What about all the snow, Leonardo, and what about the ice?” I protested. “I have wonderful friends, gifted individuals like you—but no one among us is a penguin.”
“Penguins only inhabit cold areas in the Southern Hemisphere,” Leonardo said helpfully.
“Oh, you know very well what I mean,” I huffed, but in the end I gave Leonardo permission to study how a permanent Santa headquarters might be established at the North Pole. He quickly traveled to New York City to meet with Robert Peary, a civil engineer who was determined to become the first person ever to reach the North Pole. Such visits to people involved in projects he found interesting were common for Leonardo. About this same time, he frequently made his way to Dayton, Ohio, where, in his words, he “helped out” brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright. Leonardo said he liked visiting the brothers because they were experts at building and repairing bicycles, a new form of two-wheeled, self-pedaled transportation that had become very popular with children. But the rest of us suspected our old friend was curious about how long it might take the Wrights to invent an airplane using the same principles of flight Leonardo had applied to my sleigh and reindeer so many years earlier.
While he traveled and studied, the rest of us went on about our increasingly complicated business. Earning the money to pay for our mission became harder every year. We certainly weren’t the only toy manufacturers in the world anymore. It also was necessary to constantly monitor countries where we wanted to give gifts, but were kept from doing so by revolutions and other political problems. Russia, for instance, had a great religious tradition that included extended celebrations of Christ’s birth, but more and more it seemed a possible new government there might discourage these celebrations, and, indeed, religious freedom altogether.
And in 1898, America got itself into another war, this time with Spain, though the conflict’s few battles between April, when war was declared, and August, when a treaty was signed, were all fought on islands adjacent to the United States—Puerto Rico and Cuba. Theodore Roosevelt, the former New York City police commissioner whom Layla had so much admired, turned out to be the dominant figure in the Spanish-American War, leading a troop of soldiers he called the “Rough Riders” on a charge up San Juan Hill in Puerto Rico that thrilled his fellow Americans. Soon afterward, Roosevelt was elected governor of New York, then vice president of the United States. He became president in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley. When Roosevelt assumed the office of president, I decided to carry out a plan I’d long been considering.
“I’m off to Washington, D.C.,” I told the others in the spring of 1902. “It’s been obvious to me for some time that, in order to properly carry out our mission around the world, we’ll need to make ourselves known to leaders of governments. That way, we’ll be welcome wherever we go and not suspected of being invaders or spies. President Theodore Roosevelt seems to be a person of intelligence and imagination. I want to tell him about us first, and then get his help in introducing us to the other world leaders.”
It was a simple matter to take the train to Washington and arrange an appointment with the president. Government wasn’t so complicated then. In fact, it was a tradition that once a year the White House was opened to the public, and thousands of men and women lined up to walk through it and shake the president’s hand.
When I was ushered into President Roosevelt’s office, he got up from behind his desk and, like Charles Dickens sixty years earlier, recognized me right away.
“Santa Claus! Bully!” the president blurted, peering at me from behind tiny, round-lensed eyeglasses. At first I was offended, thinking he was accusing me of picking on someone, but then I remembered that “bully” was his favorite expression of excitement and pleasure.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. President,” I began. “I’ve come to ask for your help—”
“Not at all, Santa, not at all!” He grinned. “Do call me Theodore, won’t you? Say, let me send for some cocoa and cookies. You do like cocoa and cookies, don’t you? I used to leave them out for you every Christmas when I was a boy. Oh, this is bully! You say you want my help? Anything, my friend, anything! Let’s get our refreshments and talk all about it!”
I ended up spending several days with Theodore. He insisted that I be his guest at the White House and introduced me to his wife and children, all of whom were as energetic and outgoing as their father. Theodore didn’t tell his family who I really was, of course, simply saying I was Mr. Nicholas from upper New York State who’d come to work out some land problems. Mrs. Roosevelt and most of the children seemed to accept this, but I caught one of the Roosevelt daughters, Alice, watching me closely and taking special note of my white beard and somewhat generous waistline. I think she knew.
Theodore himself I found delightful, despite his outspoken love for war and fighting. Though tremendously intelligent, the president had somehow retained the enthusiasm of a young boy. He immediately announced he would give up politics so he and his entire family could join us in our mission. It took me some time to convince him that the country needed him as president more.
“Well, could you at least name a toy after me?” Theodore pleaded, and I was happy to oblige. The most popular toy of 1903 became the teddy bear, which was named after Theodore in honor of his great interest in animals. Theodore even looked a little like a bear, with his bristling brown mustache and somewhat prominent teeth.
Theodore was happy to help me make contact with other world leaders, and in several cases used a combination of personal charm and polite threats to make them agree to assist me and my helpers whenever we required it.
That dilemma solved, I told Theodore a little about our problems in establishing a central headquarters and toy factory. He suggested we simply move into the White House—“Plenty of room here, just plenty, and wouldn’t it be bully to have you and Ben Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci and the others under the same roof with me?”
“Thank you for the offer, Theodore, but it wouldn’t be right for us to seem to belong more to one country than any other,” I explained. “As it is, we wi
ll never be able to deliver gifts to every deserving child everywhere, since our powers are limited by wars and because some parents prefer we don’t visit their homes. If we lived in the White House with you, children in other countries might think we favored American children above any others, and, as you know, we love all children equally.”
“Well, the North Pole certainly isn’t the property of any single nation, but it’s a very cold place, and unfit for humans,” Theodore replied. “I don’t care how intelligent your Leonardo da Vinci is, he’ll be hard-pressed to invent some way for you and your helpers to live up there, let alone reach it in the first place. Tell you what: We’ll get you together with Robert Peary and perhaps you can find some way to reach the North Pole successfully. That would be a good start, wouldn’t it?”
It didn’t seem polite to tell the president that Leonardo already had been talking to Robert Peary. Theodore wrote me a letter of introduction, which I didn’t have to use; Leonardo invited Peary to visit us at the Cooperstown farmhouse. He seemed very discouraged when he arrived.
“I’ve made several unsuccessful expeditions,” Peary complained. “Something always goes wrong. We head north from Canada or Alaska, and then we run out of food, or important equipment breaks down. It’s depressing.”
“Why go to so much trouble just to get to a place that really isn’t that important?” Layla asked. “I realize the North Pole is the top of the world, but, after all, once you did get there all you could do is plant a flag or something.”
Peary’s eyes gleamed. “It’s a matter of being first, Mrs. Claus, of doing something no one else in the whole history of the world has ever done before.”