Life — December 23, 1897 — page 5: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

WENN IFE feels indubitably sure that the foltorwing letter was written ina moment of melancholia, and is not only premature, but a great mustake, Immortality is the special gift of our old friend, and so long as LiFe and the children stand by him his mission will never be supersluons. A Farewell from Santa Claus. M* FRIENDS: I call you friends, be- cause you of this generation have all known me and can bear me no ill will. But Iam told that my days are numbered, and, while your children may perhaps re- member me, their children shall know me not at all, except as a tradition. The people who set their faces against all joy in the world save that of singing psalms and punishing misdoers, have said that Tamalie. To be sureI ama lie, Thave never denied it. But has the lie to which I owe my being ever done any harm? Has any child ever grown up to blame his parents because they said I was true? Ah, friends, I know that I must die, but before I go from this world, where pleasant things are not too many, I would say a word of fond farewell to those who may perhaps cherish my memory. I die because those who preach the ten- derness of Christ to little children say that those parents lie sinfully who mask their own tender impulses under a gentle fable to please their little ones, Santa Claus was always the friend of good and trusting children, That they believed in him was a sign of the goodness of the parents who begat them. The children who believed not in him were the children of evil parents, who never cared for the happiness of their offspring. In all my long life I have typified only one thing—the love of children’s happiness. I may have been wrong to masquerade as a fecling which all kindly people have, but in these, my dying days, I cannot believe T have ever harmed oni No discovery of Science has killed me. Twas too small a lie to be worthy of the serious warfare of scientific truth, The ; fine weapons of those who, under the garb of religion, are always looking for wrong in others, have laid me low, Poor Santa Claus departs this earth, not because he did wrong, but because he could not survive ‘ the attacks of those who regard happiness as asin. Believe me, friends, I go peacefully. 1 never had any real reason for existence. Kindly people would always have been kind to their children without my aid. The best I could do was only to add a little to the joys of childhood. You know, your- selves, if you will only look back, that Christmas was not much more in your childhood than the Fourth of July. One instilled the love of fire-crackers and pos- sibly of patriotism, while the other en- hanced only the joys of family life and the love of home, and what home represents in the life of man and woman. One was fact and the other sentiment. In these days of modern Science and modern Christianity sentiment kas no place. Love of home should be atandoned to birds and beasts and brute creatures, who have neither Science nor Religion to guide them. From you, friends, who knew me in your childhood and have no unkindly memories of Santa Claus, I would not part. That I have been done to death, in what [ thought was the house of my friends, you will re- gret perhaps more than I. You, who knew me when I lived and was real, will perhaps, as you look at your little children on Christmas Day, be sorry that they too do not know me you did. But do not grieve, my friends. In Germany, where the word “ Fatherland” was born ; in Hol- land, from whose sturdy patriots some of you sprang ; in other countries where truth rules, the lie I represent still lives. America is a great and prosperous country. Per. haps those are good Americans who bold it a mark of genuine progress that its future generations of children shall have no im- aginations, and shall know nothing of Him who loved you when you were children, Santa Chats. comicbooks.com