Bhavika Vyas

This is the introduction to a short letter from the editor of The Sun, written in 1890 to an 8-year-old New York girl named Virginia O’Hanlon in response to her letter asking if there really is a Santa Claus: “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?” The letter has been reprinted thousands of times over the past 130 years.

The Sun’s Francis Pharcellus Church begins by telling the little girl that her friends are wrong — “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.” Could we live in a time more skeptical than ours today? Most of us do not even trust all we read even in the most respected media sources. Some of you might think that telling “stories” or “lies” to children sets them up for disappointment about the world.

I dislike how materialistic Christmas has become and how so many of us have lost its deeper meaning whether we remain religious or not. But I see in myself a stubborn idealism that must have been seeded in my childhood and reinforced through traditions, rituals and songs.

And I see that same idealism in young leaders — whether they were raised Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Baha’i or without religion — when they hold to a faith that tomorrow will bring another chance to renew the world. Without a willingness to believe in something we cannot see today sometimes despite all odds it becomes difficult to make the impossible possible.

In a world that can feel too cynical and skeptical, from someone who has wearied of embracing the superficial to avoid the work of the lasting, here’s to believing in goodness and generosity — and poetry.

And I wonder: what seeds were planted in you as a child to believe in a better tomorrow and in the power inside you to help bring that tomorrow about? I wonder what stories still break open your hearts — across all traditions — and I’d be so interested to know.