My letter to Santa (30 years later) in the craziest of places!
I have a wonderful Christmas story for you!
It started when I ran into Hallmark years ago to pick up something for our son. It was only the beginning of October, but they had quite a few holiday items out already.
The employees were grabbing my order for me, and while I waited I noticed a beautiful Christmas book on the counter:
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It really is a lovely book. I noticed in the first few pages that it’s based on letters sent to the city of Santa Claus, Indiana and thought, wow, the Indiana connection is cool!
I was in a hurry so I very quickly scanned through some of the pages. Each page is a scanned letter to Santa, in its original form. What’s really cool is they are separated into decades, with the first ones from the 1940’s.
Some letters are sweet, some funny, and a few are quite touching.
What a treasure!
I had no idea what a treasure it would be. 🙂 You see, I only looked at a couple pages and was getting ready to put it down when I flipped to one more.
I thought I was losing my mind for a minute.
I was looking at my own (8-year-old) handwriting.
I can’t even describe how weird it felt looking at my writing in this book. I started reading and none of it was familiar to me at first.
Then I saw the name at the bottom…Sarah. I couldn’t even believe what I was reading.
It was my letter to Santa:
If you can’t read it here’s what it says (spelling corrected):
Dear Santa Claus,
I love you very much. I watched a show about you and they said there was no Santa Claus. But I believe in you. If you are really Santa Claus could you get me a Baby Alive? They boys in my class said that there was no Santa Claus. My mom said that they will be disappointed when they don’t get anything. You are my best friend I’ve got.
Your friend,
Sarah
I read through the whole thing quickly and when I came to the part about the Baby Alive doll I started to fully realize that this was MY letter.
I wanted that doll SO BAD. 😂 She peed and pooped people. 🙂 And I got her that Christmas. (Santa is real!)
How amazing is this? I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or what. I told the ladies in the store and they couldn’t believe it.
I still can’t believe it. Out of the very few pages I looked at, my letter was one of them. What a special, special experience.
My letter was chosen from millions of letters sent from all over the world over the span of many decades!
I remember where we lived when I got the doll I asked for. That year was a tough one — my parents had just separated and my Mom and I moved from our farmhouse in a very small town to an apartment in Indianapolis.
I was out of my element and missed my Dad SO much. It was just a rough year overall.
My childhood was wonderful in so many ways, but there were a lot of hard times. I only have one small box of memories and some photos from my childhood — everything else was lost.
So as you can imagine, I’m THRILLED to have this part of my history.
What a beautiful gift to get a piece of my childhood in such a lovely and unexpected way.
It’s on the basement end table and I look through it every now and again:
P.S. My handwriting was pretty awesome for about eight years old, right? And how I spelled “disappointed” correctly and not “said,” I’ll never know. 😉
