Dinos are the New Santa



My 3 year old loves dinos. So do most kids and many adults. That’s why so many movies have them from the Jurassic Park trilogy (with part four in the offing) to Godzilla. Hell, the remake of King Kong had a scene where the eponymous gorilla/ape/whatever fights, who else, dinos on the island! And all this interest then translates into shows on Discovery and National Geographic that are watched by kids and adults alike.

The animation is so real that the younger kids actually believe that dinos still exist. My 3 year old is one of them. Ask where we can find dinos and she’ll say, “Jurassic Park”. I’m guessing that in her head that’s like a zoo for dinos!

Way back in 1897, an 8 year old girl named Virginia O’Hanlon was crushed to learn from her friends that Santa was imaginary. So she wrote to the New York Sun asking “Is there a Santa Claus?” The Sun’s editorial writer Francis Pharcellus Church penned the response that went on to make history! Huh? That’s because Church used it as “an opportunity to rise above the simple question and address the philosophical issues behind it” (that’s Wikipedia’s description)! You’ll understand why when you read the following phrases from Church’s response:
“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.”
And adds:
“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.”
Obviously this is not a response meant for an 8 year old! The “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” line has become a template (in America and hence the Net) to be used thus: “Yes, Virginia, there is (a) (subject – person, object, activity, and/or concept)”. It is an extremely popular way of making statements of fact, satire or parody.

I hope someone will write a similar letter when my daughter eventually asks the question, “Do dinos still exist?”

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