Day for many creeds, cultures, species

SOLIDARITY. Charity. Selflessness. With these themes, the city's religious leaders yesterday urged people to follow God's example as they celebrated Christmas.

The Christmas call to fulfilment

Many people will be familiar with the statement "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus". It was made by Francis Pharcellus Church in an unsigned editorial in New York's Sun newspaper in 1897 in response to a letter from eight year-old Virginia O'Hanlon asking whether her friends were correct in telling her that there was no Santa Claus. "Virginia," wrote Church, "your little friends are wrong." They were wrong, he argued, because they had been "affected by the scepticism of a sceptical age" and foolishly believed in only those things which they could see. In what is believed to be the most reprinted newspaper editorial of all time, Church went on to write that Santa Claus exists "as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist" and he suggested that were it otherwise the world would be a dreary place, for it would be one with "no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence". With a flourish, he added that without Santa Claus the "eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished".

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Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death

PICK OF THE WEEK

THE ATHEIST'S GUIDE TO CHRISTMAS Edited by Ariane Sherine Friday Books, 340pp, $29.99

Always happy to be made a laughing stock

"NO ROOM at the inn" is a central tenet of the Christmas story. And this Christmas, seven young comedians are being welcomed into one very funny new stable.