Task 3: What about letters to Santa? Do you remember your first letter to Santa? If you have children, did your children write letters to Santa and did you pretend to mail them?
I never bothered with letters to Santa, as even before I learned to write I’d already clued into the fact that it was neither he nor the Baby Jesus who put them under the Christmas tree. (The “Christ Child” / “Christkind” is an alternative bringer of Christmas presents according to German lore.) I’m pretty sure the same is true for every other kid in my family, too, or at least those of my generation — as I remember, all of us had a firm grip on what was make-believe and what was real fairly early on.
I don’t even recall writing Christmas wish lists, either: if I wanted something for Christmas or my birthday, I just told my mom or my grandma, and either would get a response along the lines of “we’ll have to see about that then” or flat-out “sorry, we can’t afford that”. My mom wasn’t earning a lot of money when I was little, so I learned early on that not all wishes can be fulfilled — in hindsight, I am all the more grateful to her for how much she did make possible in order not to make me develop too much of a sense of deprivation (and how much she must have denied herself, without ever giving me the slightest inkling of it).
Perhaps all of the above is why I am all the more charmed by J.R.R. Tolkien’s gorgeous, lovingly-created and illustrated Letters from Father Christmas, and the fact that Tolkien and his kids continued the exchange long after the children had grown up enough to understand that it wasn’t actually Santa Claus (or Father Christmas) who was writing to them but their own father — and they just went on writing to him in turn so as to say thank you and reciprocate the love that was going into each of his letters.
Here are a few images from around the web (though I suspect most here have seen and read the letters and probably own at least one copy):
We send a few cards at Christmas to selected friends and relatives, though when I was working I always hated the pressure to write and give out cards to colleagues, noting that many of the ones I received had perfunctory, impersonal or generic messages (which seemed rather pointless) so I gave up on them.
As for Christmas letters (’round robins’ we call them here) the ones we receive — fewer and fewer each year I’m relieved to say — are often just cataloguing holidays or boasting about achievements by the senders or, more likely these days, their offspring. I hate these with a vengeance, and one year we sent off a spoof version of our own which I think may have marginally reduced the number we subsequently received (though I may be kidding myself).
Anyway, what’s social media for if not to keep one updated throughout the year and not just in one splurge at the end of the year?! I must admit I’m rather a Bah-Humbug kind of person where the season is concerned…