The tree is decorated, the lights are strung and Christmas music greets you in every shop you enter. Ho-ho-ho! Jolly tunes. Unbearably so. For many of us this Christmas won’t be all that merry – simply something to be survived.

So, how do you endure the empty chair at the festive table? As poet Lamartine writes: “Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.” But it’s not. The other chairs will be filled with real people. Flesh and blood people.

You’d better remember not to talk to the empty chair in front of your guests. Only someone who has lost a life partner will truly hear Jeanette Winterson when she says that grief means living with someone who is not there. And yes, it involves talking out loud. Eventually it involves realising that you just might still be alive yourself.

“That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying I went closer, and I did not die,” writes Mary Oliver. “And that is just the point . . . how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. Here you are, alive. What would you like to do with your one wild and precious life?”

As Gary Zukav writes: “We cannot stop the winter or the summer from coming. We cannot stop the spring or the fall or make them other than they are. They are gifts from the universe that we cannot refuse. But we can choose what we will contribute to life when each arrives.”

Christmas is arriving. Soon. Nothing you can do to stop it. So, how about each of us – maybe especially those of us who live with people who aren’t here – try to tap in to the magic as only a child can. Yes, girlfriend, we can and, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”.

This is the story of Virginia O’Hanlon, an eight-year-old girl whose friends told her that there was no Santa Claus. When she asked her father he advised her to write a letter to ‘The New York Sun’. Surely the newspaper would know the answer. This was in 1897.

Veteran editor Francis P Church had covered the Civil War for ‘The New York Times’ and had worked on the ‘The New York Sun’ for 20 years. When controversial subjects had to be tackled, the assignments were usually given to him.

Francis’ answer to Virginia was reprinted annually until 1949 when the paper went out of business. In 1932 his answer was adapted into a cantata, the only known editorial set to classical music. In 1974 it was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning animated television special, in 1991 into a made-for-TV movie, and in 1996 into a holiday musical.

Francis told Virginia that the world would be dreary if there were no Santa Claus! “It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”

“Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus.”

“The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.”

Francis wrote that “there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond.”

Is it all real? Ah, girlfriend, it is as Francis told Virginia: In all this world there is nothing else as real and abiding.