A Letter from Santa Claus
In addition to spending the pandemic getting to grips with technology, Santa has been honing his letter writing skills. This year, through Santa’s Calling You, he is offering a personalised letter from Santa service – can you imagine how thrilled the kids will be to receive a letter from the big man himself prior to Christmas Eve?
We at Santa’s Calling You have permission from Santa to use the North Pole stamp of approval, so ordering a personalised letter from Santa Claus to invite the family to a video call for festive fun is an amazing way to start Christmas.
Your letter will also include Magic Reindeer food for the children to sprinkle outside so that they can find your house on Christmas Eve (don’t worry, if the reindeer aren’t hungry, birds like it too!).
But how and why did we start writing letters to Santa Claus? Here’s a bit of history.
The first letter to Santa in the UK would seem to date from 1895. A young girl in Lincolnshire asked Santa for a paint set, and the letter still forms part of the archives of a local Lincolnshire newspaper, the Grantham Journal. Apparently, she got her box of paints.
The story behind the letter is a sad one. The girl’s father had died of smallpox, and the family were in extreme poverty. The little girl and her brother decided to write to “Father Christmas, The North Pole, the GPO” – the letter read “We should like to have something to play with as we have nothing”. Whether a kindly postmaster decided to have a whip-round to get gifts for the children or whether the letter was indeed passed on to Santa, Christmas was just a little bit happier than it might otherwise have been.
Within a decade, the Post Office was receiving thousands of letters to Santa Claus every single year, and they needed a department dedicated to them – initially the ‘returned mail’ office at Mount Pleasant in London (meaning that sadly, they weren’t always answered) – and by the 1920s they were struggling to cope with the volume. Also, until 1913, it was technically illegal to reply to a letter to Santa Claus (especially letters address to Santa under some of his other names, as there are quite a few people with surnames like Christmas, Kringle, and Nicholas, and undoing someone else’s post was – and is – against the law!). Plenty of postmasters did break the law and allow staff to answer them, and then from just before the First World War, a permanent exception to the rule was made. Even so, letters have to be addressed explicitly to “Santa Claus” to avoid the risk of reading someone else’s private letters.
It would be another 40 years before the the Post Office would be able to find a better solution – prompted by the French!
By 1962, the French government was having a similar problem. However, letters to Santa Claus are serious business, so a new law was made. Every letter addressed to “La Père Noël” had to be replied to with a postcard from Santa Claus. The Postmaster General in the UK was rather caught on the hop; at that year’s Christmas press conference, he was asked if this process could be adopted here in the UK. Not to be outdone by his French counterparts, he hinted that yes indeed, this was possible.
So from Christmas 1963, reply cards were sent out with the simple message “be good; be fast asleep”, complete with a ‘Reindeerland’ postmark.
However, some early letters were from Santa, as parents used them as a useful ‘behave, or else’ tool in the run up to Christmas. The poet Longfellow’s wife, Fanny, wrote letters to her children every Christmas, detailing particular actions over the course of the year. One example to her son Charley in 1851 reads “I am sorry I sometimes hear you are not so kind to your little brother as I wish you were”. Other writers took the charade one step further – for 25 years, J.R.R. Tolkien stepped out of creating Middle Earth and would leave his children (presumably well into young adulthood!) detailed updates on life in the North Pole, complete with snow elves, red gnomes, and Santa’s assistant in chief, the North Polar Bear.
Post Offices also presented a ‘magic solution’ for getting letters to Santa before they put a reply system in place. In a stroke of creativity, they suggested to children that their letters to Santa were put on the fire, so that they would go ‘up in smoke’ straight up the chimney, directly to Santa on Christmas Eve as he was coming down! Scottish children would also help matters along by putting their heads up the chimney and shouting their Christmas requests.
To save yourself having to shout up the chimney, book your live video call direct from the North Pole now, and simply add a letter from Santa as an add-on. Don’t forget to look at our other extras – our Secret Santa Box and Santa’s Calling You Story Time Book - and add these too for an extra magical Christmas 2021.
