Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus (1974)

              Once again we have the story behind a seminal piece of American Christmas literature, this time the backstory of the famous editorial written by Francis Church and published on September 21, 1897 in the newspaper The New York Sun.  The actual story is heartwarming enough and well-documented: eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the newspaper asking whether or not there was a Santa Claus and one of the editors wrote in response that yes, there was.  The editorial was written in a heightened, slightly florid style that was in fashion at the time.  He tied the existence of Santa Claus to the presence of hope and necessity of love and a bunch of other neat things.  It drew some attention at the time and was republished in subsequent years by both other newspapers and The New York Sun itself until it eventually became a staple of yearly Christmas editions, becoming noteworthy enough to itself be the subject of articles and news stories and eventually this special.  The title phrase has grown to become iconic.

              I would argue that its popularity was an example of the increasing solidification of Santa Claus as a popular concept in the public consciousness that took place over the course of the nineteenth century.  St. Nicholas, of course, had been around for centuries and the name Santa Claus itself is a modification of the Dutch Sinterklaas, or St. Nicholas.  The New York State region had been settled by the Dutch, thus the term was popular in the area and morphed into Santa Claus by the early 19^th century.  Clement Clark Moore’s poem ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’ in 1823 established most of the traits associated with our modern conception of the figure and the paintings of Thomas Nast during and after the Civil War gave people a mental picture to associate in their minds.  The works of Charles Dickens and the fondness of Queen Victoria for the German-style celebrations of the season came together in such a way that by the time 1897 rolled around it was entirely understandable why a little girl wrote to a newspaper to ask about the figure and for the paper to try to get some publicity by answering her.

              A rather more interesting question about this special was why they chose to tell this story in 1974.  The story itself was fairly well known and had been adapted at least once before as a part of the 1945 short ‘Santa Claus Story.’ There was an uptick in its popularity after the 1971 death of Virginia O’Hanlon herself, but if I had to guess it was the suddenly soaring reputation of newspapers following the reporting of the Watergate scandal.  Nixon tendered his resignation on August 8, 1974 and this special premiered on December 6, 1974.  I’m certainly not saying that one inspired the other but I bet it got a lot easier to get this into production after that than it would have been a couple of years earlier.  The only things valorized more than Santa Claus in this special are The New York Sun and the inherent nobility of newspapers.

              The first and most overwhelming thing you’ll notice when you watch this is that it looks and sounds like a Charlie Brown special.  This is due to the presence of director Bill Melendez, director of almost all of the Peanuts holiday cartoons up to this point and who would direct most of them for the next couple decades.  The art department was also made up of Peanuts vets, so the deceptively crude, scratchy animation style was less a case of biting someone else’s style and more the original artists doing some off-brand work.  The production also copied the decision to have the children characters voiced by actual children, including occasional moments of all of them talking at once in sudden bursts of sound.  They did let actual adults talk, though, so think of this as a slightly parallel Peanuts world with corporeal parents and fewer weird dogs.

              The story is fairly straightforward and bare bones so instead of going the ‘Santa and the Three Bears’ route and stuffing it full of padding the professionals involved here instead fill the margins with creative side characters, little bits of comic business, and more historical tangents than are strictly necessary.  This also lets me indulge in some ‘spot the anachronisms,’ which is frankly pointless considering this is a modestly-budgeted tv special from 1974 but it’s fun so I don’t care, and also the special does a better job than you’d think.  When Virginia asks her dad about the existence of Santa Claus he goes off on a tangent about people believing in things they can’t see and has her whip out the family stereoscope, which was indeed a real thing available for commercial purchase at the time in roughly the form shown here.  Think of it as an early ViewMaster.  He proceeds to show her several examples, including how people thought the earth was flat when Columbus sailed (they didn’t, but people in 1974 certainly thought they thought that; I have no knowledge of what they were teaching in 1897, though, or for that matter what people in 1974 thought people in 1897 thought people in 1492 thought).  Other examples include Marconi and wireless transmission, Edison and light bulbs, and Bell with telephones.  Edison is fine in this context, commercial lightbulbs had been available for twenty years by that point, and I’ll even give them Bell as telephones had been around since 1876, although they illustrate the point with payphones, which technically first appeared in the US in 1889, however standalone booths as they show here weren’t around until 1905.  Marconi’s an interesting case as in 1897 he was still in the middle of proving wireless communication as a concept, at the time of this story impressing scientists in England by transmitting across water a whole 3.7 miles, so while it’s certainly possible that a well-informed family could be aware of Marconi I don’t know that a father would bust that out as an example to his eight year old of notable scientific progress.

              Less comical are some of the social conventions of 1897 as shown through a 1974 lens.  The group of kids that little Virginia runs with is fairly diverse, including a nerdy boy with glasses, an African American girl who acts very 1974, and an Asian stereotype right out of an old Rice Krinkles commercial.  The kid is at least played by an Asian actor, Christopher Wong, while his “honorable father” Lee Fong is … not.  I could go on a tear about the implausibility of this friend group considering the setting is just thirty years after the Civil War and fifteen years after the Asian Exclusion Act but, y’know, it was 1974 and at least they were trying.  ‘Sesame Street’ had only been around for five years by that point, it took a while for people to catch up.  If that sounds like a weak defense that’s because it very much is.

              The special itself tells the story fairly straight, if inaccurately, no shadowy figure in the sky on Christmas night or mysterious present left at the end as a ‘what if’ moment to imply that maybe Santa Claus really does exist.  As shown here all of the people involved are much higher-class than they probably were, the editor Francis Church is persuaded to write the piece by a plucky newsboy he takes a shine to, the editorial is published on the front page with a banner headline when it was really buried at the bottom of the editorial section, those are all changes you need to make when you’re adapting something like this.  The only halfway iffy part comes in with the narrator, voiced by Jim Bacchus at his jolliest, who open and closes the runtime while interjecting occasionally throughout and who is eventually revealed to the audience to be Santa Claus himself.  He’s seen reaching into frame occasionally and correcting crooked letters in the titles or parts of the background.  He never interacts with any of the children so clearly this is a story he’s telling to the audience and therefore not part of the actual text, which is a clever way to get out of answering the central question, which to be fair is also the story of the editorial itself.

              I genuinely wonder if the answer given by the editorial is one of the reasons we keep having so many examples of Christmas media that revolve around this same issue.  The “sure Santa is real, as real as love and kindness and blah de blah” answer, which is a very gentle and roundabout way of telling children “no.”  It provides a way to duck the issue while giving a nice-sounding non-answer that most people will walk away from feeling satisfied about.  I think it’s telling that all of these specials pose the same questions about what the true meaning of Christmas is and propose their own answers but more keep being produced year after year, rather giving the game away that nobody has come up with a solid answer yet.  I would argue that, like so many questions that can be stated simply but contain fractal levels of gnarled sub-meanings once you break down what is actually being asked, there is no actual answer.  Unfortunately that doesn’t fit into a half-hour time slot (including commercials).  Or hour-long time slot, honestly fuck you, ‘Santa and the Three Bears.’

              If you’re a big fan of Charlie Brown specials and would like a well-done, breezy little telling of the story behind the famous editorial and don’t mind a whole bunch of “based on a true story” style shenanigans you’re not going to do much better than this one.  I’m genuinely surprised it’s fallen so much out of general circulation, the only copy I could find was a super-low-res rip on Dailymotion, it does not seem otherwise available.  If you’re a fan of old-school Peanuts specials this will slot right in alongside classics like ‘Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown’ and ‘A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.’