However we may measure the troubles and challenges of our particular day and age, we are sometimes reminded that we islanders and Americans have survived darker times still.

We thought of such this week, browsing back issues of the Review and the musings of our editorial forebears, Walt and Mildred Woodward. The following appeared in this space on Dec. 20, 1946, under the headline, “Remarks to a man with a beard.” The historical context should be readily apparent; we trust it will warm readers’ hearts as it did ours.

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“Rest a minute at your workbench, Santa, while we ramble

on a bit.

“We recall another Christmas issue of the Review and how we wrote a bit of fantasia about what a dickens of a time you were having reaching your chimneys. We had you and your reindeer ducking anti-aircraft fire over Europe; we rode in agony with you as you searched for a place in this world where they still remembered Christmas; and we shouted a Yuletide greeting as you finally found Bainbridge Island – a place where there was still Peace on Earth.

“On a later, more gloomy Christmas for us islanders (by that time, we, too, were involved in the war), we remember feeling as though there was little good in mankind. Adults, we said, had made a bloody hell of their civilization and a mockery of Christmas. So we quoted Odgen Nash’s ‘A Carol for the Children,’ in which he wrote:

‘God rest you, merry innocents,

While innocence endures,

A sweeter Christmas than we to ours,

May you bequeath to yours.’

“Now, Santa, we come to another Christmas. In our family, our oldest daughter has discovered what she imagines to be fakery in the business about the Good Fairy replacing with a dime the loose tooth which she puts under her pillow. It seems that some disbeliever has informed her that it is really her Mother or her Daddy who leaves the dimes.

“We’re afraid, Santa, that our daughter may get around to you next, although for this Christmas, at least, she still is counting on you. Would that we had the editorial simplicity of a Francis Church, who wrote that classic answer to a little girl’s plea in the New York Sun of 1897: ‘No Santa Claus! I thank God, he lives and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.’

“Yes, this is another Christmas, Santa; a Christmas with more hope in it than we’ve seen in a long time; a Christmas which hints of a chance that our little girl and her children never may know the sound and fury of a world at war; a Christmas which says there yet may be such a thing as peace and really good will among us all.

“So you see, Santa, we approach you and this Christmas-yet-to-be with an apology. We had our dark years of doubt; we kept you alive only as a game for the small fry. We now know, of course, that we were keeping you alive for ourselves, too.

“Work on faster in your toy shop, Old Boy! May our little girl always cherish you…as we do! Merry Christmas, Santa!”

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And Merry Christmas, Bainbridge Island.