A Different View with Dave O’Connell

These days the Christmas ads haven’t even the decency to wait for Halloween before hitting the screens with the combined aim of tugging at your heartstrings and at your wallet with the one small minute of advertising agency-manufactured magic.

And of course Christmas and commercialism are utterly intertwined; many stores depend on the festive spend to sustain them until St Patrick’s Day comes around — and that’s a trickier proposition in an era when the busiest people on the festival purchase front are couriers delivering internet goodies.

But Christmas isn’t actually about presents — although there’s not much to be gained by turning up empty-handed on the day, and proclaiming that you’d made a conscious decision to ease the family away from commercialisation.

But somewhere between the retail world where Christmas begins on November 1 and the old days when it began on December 24, there lies a happy middle ground — where the real spirit of Christmas can be found in all of its innocence.

Because if you want something that encapsulates the spirit of Christmas, then look no further than the famous ‘Dear Virginia’ letter that first appeared in the New York Sun of September 21, 1897.

Virginia O’Hanlon — who, with a name like that, must have been one of our own — was from West Ninety Fifth Street in New York.

She was eight years old and some of her friends were saying there was no such person as Santa Claus — so Virginia wrote to her local paper to seek the truth because, as she put it: “Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun, it’s so’.”

Please tell me the truth, she asked the editor, is there a Santa Claus?

And even if you’ve read it a million times and every Christmas of your life, his reply still has to bring a lump to the throat and a tear to the eye.

“Virginia,” he says, “your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the scepticism of a sceptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.

“All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.

“We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.