Christmas wishes come from young writers
Every year about this time, our newspaper, along with many others, publish children's letters to Santa Claus. It's always fun to see these letters because they are creative and fun.
Sometimes, you have to really sound things out to understand what the children want, as you can only imagine how a 4-year-old can spell "Transformer" or "Barbie Dream House."
The basic form of Santa letters hasn't changed since I penned one many years ago. There's the set up ("I love you Santa," or "How is Mrs. Claus?") followed by a disclaimer ("Mom said I've been good" or "I will try to be good in the future.") The actual meat of the letter follows ("I want a million dollars" or "I want an I-Pod.") This is always followed by the closing bribe ("I will leave you milk and cookies," and, sometimes, "I will leave a carrot for the reindeer.")
This year, however, was a year of firsts for our Santa letters.
We received our first letter written entirely in Spanish. I hope I didn't mangle it too bad when I was typing it, though I understand Santa has excellent translators. We also received our first letter to Santa retraction. It seemed the child had written a letter at school asking Santa not to bring her sibling anything because they'd been bad.
Mom caught wind of this and the youngster was required to write another letter letting Santa know she was just kidding and her sibling was good, too.
I have a feeling Santa has learned to not rely too much on reports from brothers and sisters when deciding the "naughty" or "nice" part. We also received a letter from a young child asking for her daddy to be let out of jail. We opted to leave that line out of the letter since it contained the child's first and last name and we didn't want to embarrass the family. I do hope the dad sees the original letter, though. I hope he's embarrassed enough to get his act together and make sure his child never has to ask Santa to bring him home again.
This year's letters are full of hopes and dreams. There's plenty of requests for video games, Webkinz (I didn't even know what those were until recently but just imagine a Beanie Baby with on-line capabilities) and even a few requests for underwear and socks. I guess those kids are banking on the reverse psychology idea, asking for something boring in hopes of getting something fun. Whatever they want, I hope every child sees his or hers dreams come true this year. So, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas. (And, Santa, I wouldn't mind the $1 million either.)
