#24: letters to Santa

the history of childhood and kids' festive demands

Dec 10, 2023

December 10th? Holy shit, y’all. The tree is up, a train to Germany is on the books for tomorrow, and I plan to spend at least 70% of the trip bopping around Christmas markets as a feral creature of the season.

But that’s tomorrow; today, we’re sending this newsletter, where y’all will get to sip on the metaphorical mulled wine that is…

💌 our brand-spankin’ new referral program,

💌 the history of letters to Santa,

💌 choice examples from across the decades,

💌 and the history of childhood itself.

Drink up!

File:Krampus 1900s 4.jpg — *Krampus Claws is coming to town!*

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Now onto this month’s historical mail dive…

Back in the day, Santa sent letters to us

In Western Europe and the US, childhood once looked wildly different. Kids were expected to be small adults (child labor, anyone?). They definitely weren’t allowed to squeal and run circles around the table at Olive Garden while the family tried to celebrate Grandpa’s retirement.

Given the cultural fixation on ~manners~, children weren’t sending gift demands to Santa a la Lady Compton. Instead, “Santa” (exhausted parents) would deliver their children letters alongside their gifts. These letters gave an end-of-year behavior summary, pointing out their kids naughtiest habits and pushing (shaming) them to do better.

The entire time I was researching this phenomenon, I could only think about this scene from a Muppet Christmas Carol1:

Annual progress reports from Santa seem like something pre-haunting Scrooge would’ve loved.

One of the better examples comes from 1851. Fanny Longfellow, wife of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, penned this letter to her son. It toes an era-appropriate line of praise and festive (?) reprimand:

My dear Erny,

A merry Christmas again to you my dear little boy. I am very happy to see you looking so stout & well, but as I peeped through the bars of your crib I thought I saw a thumb looking very damp & swollen as if it had been in the warm bath of your mouth instead of snugly under the bed-clothes. I thought such big boys never treated their poor thumbs so, & I hope you will soon leave yours in quiet & grow more of a man too about crying whenever you are a little hurt. I love little brave boys, but of all things I love them to be good & obedient & kind to all about them, never saying naughty words nor using their feet except to walk or jump, & particularly to remember to be very kind to their brothers & sisters. But I have heard you were often sorry when you did wrong and I love you very much for that – for I dearly love all good children.

I bring you some soldiers to play with & a horn of sugar plums & some books Mr. Rölker dropped in my bag & now I must say goodnight, away I go – as light as snow, to fill more little stockings than I can well count before morning. Keep your little teeth bright to laugh for me next year.

Yr loving2
SANTI CLAUS

As a certified crybaby, I say she’s wrong; bring on the waterworks! But despite her reproaches, love hums from the letter, especially that line about Erny being “often sorry” for when he “did wrong.”

A role reversal

Exactly twenty years after Fanny Longfellow’s letter, the craze of sending letters to Santa took off in the U.S., thanks in part to this cartoon by Thomas Nast:

Also a photo of you, exhausted by yet another work email when all you wanna do is hit the nog.

The dinky stack on the right is labeled “Letters from GOOD children’s parents.” The tower on the left? “Letters from NAUGHTY children’s parents.

Maybe kiddos wanted to plead their cases, or maybe parents, traumatized by the Santa-induced reprimands from their own childhoods, wanted to give their kids something more festive in the mailbox.

Soon, parents were even helping children write letters to Santa, like this treasure from a cowboy-obsessed girl in the ‘40s or ‘50s:

*Courtesy of the Smithsonian, who got it from the Santa Claus Museum and Village.*

Each letter is a time capsule, providing an often-tragic snapshot of the era, like this Christmas plea from the 1930s:

Dear Santa Claus
Please bring for me a pair of warm gloves and for John a pair of shoes size 1 and for Claire some warm underwear and for Joe stockiins size 10 and for Rose gloves for 12 years old becuz we are poor and got no money for toys or candy Please come to our house as I will be waiting for you -

Do you think he waited all night? Do you think that, when Santa never came and he and his siblings shivered all winter, something in him hardened? Do you think he remembered the disappointment of that Christmas until he was old?

Does that make you want to cry as much as it does me?

I don’t know if the incredibly relatable final paragraph makes this 90-year-old letter sadder or sillier:

“Jimmie ain’t so good so if you want you could leave him out - he is 10 years old. Mama is fat but she never wants anything for Christmas”

Maybe both. Even in the middle of a cold-ass winter, this kid couldn’t resist taking jabs at his family.

Unsurprisingly, throwing siblings under the bus is common as hell in notes to Santa. Letter after letter ends with a PS along the lines of, “honestly? Carrie lowkey sucks. How about you give me double gifts and call it a day?”

This girl from 1982 is a great example. She doesn’t care what Santa gets her, so long as her dumb brother gets zilch:

The spirit of giving

Maybe all these snarky-ass kids grow up to be guilt-ridden adults, because in the past century, it’s become common for folks to “adopt” a kid’s letter to Santa and deliver presents on Santa’s behalf. Originally the project was overseen by private charities, but now the US Post Office now manages its own un-Grinchy program directly. They upload the letters to a database for people to formally adopt to make someone’s year.

(If you’re feeling decidedly post-haunting-Scrooge this season and want to spread some cheer, nab a letter through Operation Santa before the 18th to brighten a family’s Christmas.)

The invention of childhood

All this got me thinking about children in general. How did we go from “Santa’s gonna drag you through the dirt for your shitty behavior, Jon,” to “Hey, Jonny Boy, tell Santa exactly what the frick you want” in such a short period of time?

Although Western Europe largely saw kids as tiny adults, not all societies throughout history agreed. In Ancient Mesopotamia (a juicy time in history), kids had spinning discs and jump rope. And archaeologists in what’s now France and Spain recently found toys that are up to 21,000 years old, like this optical illusion disc:

*Courtesy of M. AZÉMA AND F. RIVÈRE, © PASSÉ SIMPLE, ANTIQUITY 2012*

Before colonization, the Aztecs had (sorta) egalitarian education standards: all kids got schooling, although boys got a more rounded education. And on top of school, Aztec kids had ample play time; games like mesoamerican ball game (the oldest ball game in the world!) were a common part of childhood across central America for centuries.

But in the past thousand years, western European culture (Christmas central) didn’t value playtime as much as they did purity and boys’ education. Boys as young as thirteen attended university, and til the mid-1800s in England, law-breaking kiddos in England could be whipped and sent to grown-up jails from the age of seven. I can’t help but picture the haggard forty-year-old con-artist trapped in a prison cell with a chatty eight year old (has someone made that crime caper blockbuster yet?).

On top of that, child labor was everywhere in the west. Kids regularly got sent to do dangerous tasks for shit pay3. We’ve all seen those pics of baby chimney sweeps. Imagination and a pillow-hearted childhood wasn’t a cultural right til the latter half of the 1800s - and from there, standardized education, kids’ books, and child labor laws became the norm - bringing us the technicolor, cartoon-laced Christmastime we enjoy today.

This isn’t to say that back then, the west didn’t value children and love them as much as every other culture, or that these other societies were childhood utopias. There’s this Polish poet, Jan Kochanowski, who in 1580 wrote a series of poems called Laments about the death of his two-year-old daughter, Urszulka.

In one, he wrote,4

Wherever you may be - if you exist -
take pity on my grief. O presence missed
comfort me, haunt me; you whom I lost,
come back again, be shadow, dream, or ghost.

In an era when daughters weren’t seen as particularly ~useful~, Kochanowski grieved his Urszulka so hard and so beautifully, he’s now generally credited as the dude who invented Polish poetry.

If I had to guess at what changed, why we started reveling in childhood innocence relatively recently, it would be that modern times mean modern safety should be a given for all children5. Heating and medicine and access to food/water can give kids the space to bask in childhood and focus less on survival and more on the important stuff: letters to Santa and candies and Game Boys and claymation Rudolph.

James Baldwin’s 1980 essay Notes on the House of Bondage6 put the human love we ought to feel for all children best when he said, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.“

A great sentiment to keep in mind now more than ever.

Have a great holiday season, y’all~

Keep your eyeballs on the lookout for December’s voting on the 20th. Hopefully I’ll have some wintry train pics to add a little festive spirit.

And to all my Jewish friends smack dab in the heart of the winter holidays, Happy Hanukkah! I hope everyone’s finding some beauty, enjoying family, and getting cozy. <3

If you’re feeling chatty, drop a comment about a holiday present you remember getting amped about as a kid! For Christmas one year, my mom got me a thick book on sea creatures. It had several hundred bible-thin pages and amazing pictures. Six-year-old me fucking loved it. How about you?

Snail Mail Sweethearts