Let’s Hear It for the Jolly Old Elf

--Yes, Virginia, if you were here today, you would find the debate over the existence of Santa Claus still very much alive. It goes on, even as it did when you were a child in 1897. Just last week, Father Romano Ferraro told his Roman Catholic parishioners in Woodbridge, N.J., that dear old St. Nicholas was dead and that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa’s North Pole workshop were figments of the imagination. According to reports, he told one child that adults who tell their children there is a Santa Claus are lying. On the other hand, Virginia, Dr. Nancy Curry, a child psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, says it is perfectly normal to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny: “All children fantasize,” she said. “It’s a way of thinking in little children. It helps them master being little. . . . If he (Ferraro) had had a better understanding of child development, he would have held his tongue.” So, you see, Virginia O’Hanlon, that editorial that Frank P. Church wrote for you in the New York Sun almost 90 years ago is as current today as it was then. Church wrote: “ . . . Alas, how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. . . .”

--Tuba players by the hundreds were out in full force in New York City, helping to oom-pah in Christmas with perhaps the biggest and loudest show on ice. The volunteer musicians, who came from all across the country, serenaded the crowds at the skating rink in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center with “Silent Night” and other carols as they put on the annual “Tuba Christmas,” an event that is almost as popular as the center’s tree-lighting ceremony. “It’s wonderful,” said performance director Harvey Phillips, 57, the University of Indiana tuba professor who started the all-tuba concerts more than 10 years ago. “It sounds just like a giant organ. . . . The ‘Tuba Christmas’ was my way of paying tribute to William Bell, my teacher and a former member of the (John Philip) Sousa band, the NBC Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. Bell was professor of tuba at Indiana and when he died, I took his place.”

--”It’s like putting on a new pair of Sunday shoes. It’s a little tough to begin with, but once you wear them down they’re a lot more comfortable,” said Teddy Kennedy Jr., who was fitted with a new artificial leg. The lightweight, aluminum and titanium prosthesis has a hydraulic knee that will enable Kennedy to run--for the first time since he lost his right leg to bone cancer in 1973. Kennedy, 25, the son of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), said: “Having a disability is still considered a tragedy, and it shouldn’t be.” He has become a leading advocate of the disabled through his Boston-based group, Facing the Challenge.