not convince her, and Virginia decided to pose the question to The Sun. Sources conflict over whether her father suggested writing the letter, or she elected to on her own. In her letter Virginia wrote that her father had told her "If you see it in The Sun it's so." O'Hanlon later told The Sun that her father thought the newspaper would be "too busy" to respond to her question and had said to "[w]rite if you want to," but not to be disappointed if she did not get a response. After sending the letter she looked for, but did not expect, a response "[d]ay after day". O'Hanlon later said that she had waited for an answer to her letter for long enough that she forgot about it. Campbell theorizes the letter was sent shortly after O'Hanlon's birthday in July and was "overlooked or misplaced" for a time. The Sun editor-in-chief, Edward Page Mitchell, eventually gave the letter to Francis Church. Mitchell reported that Church, who was initially reluctant to write a response, produced it "in a short time" during an afternoon. Church's response was 416 words long and was anonymously published in The Sun on September 21, 1897, shortly after the beginning of the school year in New York City. The editorial appeared in the paper's third and last column of editorials that day, positioned below discussions of topics including an election law in Connecticut, a newly invented chainless bicycle, and "British Ships in American Waters". Church was not disclosed as the editorial's author until after his 1906 death. This sometimes led to inaccuracies: a republication in December 1897 by The Meriden Weekly Republican had attributed authorship to Dana, saying that the editorial could "hardly have been written" by any other employee of the paper. The editorial is one of two whose authorship The Sun disclosed; the other being Harold M. Anderson's "[Charles] Lindbergh Flies Alone". Campbell argued in 2006 that Church might not have welcomed The Sun's disclosure, noting that he had generally been unwilling to disclose the authorship of editorials. Summary The editorial, as it first appeared in The Sun, was prefaced with the text of O'Hanlon's letter asking the paper to tell her the truth; "is there a Santa Claus?" O'Hanlon wrote that some of her "little friends" had told her that Santa Claus was not real. Church's response began: "Virginia, your little friends are wrong.