DECEMBER 24, 2024 – This morning my wife announced that she’d found tucked away in the very back of her underwear drawer[1], a neat stash of letters that our two sons had written to Santa Claus back in ancient times. Of course I wanted to see it—the stash of letters, I mean.
They reflected a progression of penmanship from year to year. As the writing skill expanded, I noticed, so did the length of the requests. They read as archeological records of a couple of American kids growing up in the early 1990s. Some things never change: Legos; Star Wars; video games; our culture’s obsession with major league sports; and an insatiable thirst for stuff and things. The six-page letter from 1994 read like the inventory list of a national chain store carrying the latest movies, Star Wars paraphernalia, Game Boy games, and sweatshirts featuring every team in the NFL and NBA. If “Santa” had popped for 10% of the items on that list, we would have needed to move into a warehouse to accommodate them all. Our culture’s acquisitiveness hasn’t changed, and accordingly, from Christmas 1994 to Christmas 2024 the S&P has rocketed from 460 to over 6,000—the latter after rebounded a bit from this month’s earlier slide.
But some things change so radically, one is left to wonder what’s next, especially with the growth of AI against a backdrop of dystopian social media, urgency alarms by climatologists and tectonic shifts in accepted behaviors[2].
The most notable aspect of these Santa letters was simply the method and medium of their creation: graphite on paper. How much of the record of our current era resides tenuously in The Cloud; how little of our history is folded away securely in our underwear drawers? What of our thoughts and lives are lost forever because they’ve been cast into the fathomless digital ocean? What keys to our being are lost because we cannot hold in our hands words on paper and ponder them as we sit on the sand looking out at the real ocean?
Among the Santa letters was a typed letter that our older son gave us for Christmas in 2005, when he was a college freshman. It was written in haste and was an apology for not having figured out what to get my wife and me for presents. “In the past,” he started off, “around this time of year I begin to wonder what everybody wants for Christmas, but without the usual subtle hints, due to the fact that I live in a complete different state [Iowa; home of Drake University!], I was left with a small selection of choices.” He did manage to decide on something for each of us, but unwittingly, by way of the letter itself, he was giving us the best Christmas present a parent could expect. After acknowledging our rocky relationship through high school, he wrote, “I would also like to acknowledge everything you have done for me to bring me where I am today.” Until I read that letter again today, I’d forgotten all about it—I’d last seen it 19 years ago. As I ruminated about our son’s many struggles but also about his considerable victories, I was grateful for that tangible letter; for the deep thoughts and feelings it spawned; for the inspiration it gave me to write a Christmas letter back to him—with a pen on paper—today.
The Santa letters included a thank you letter that Cory had penned back to Santa. I’m pretty sure my wife had something to do with it; teaching him at a young age the basic trait of gratitude. It’s one that we work to instill in his nine-year daughter whenever she’s on hand. Whether she’s handed a glass of milk or a small bowl of strawberries, a simple “thank you” is expected—and given. And whenever she, in turn, does us a favor or honors a request, we too say “thank you.”
On this Christmas Eve, I’m feeling especially grateful—for the spirit of Santa and for the preservation of those archeological records stashed securely in my wife’s underwear drawer.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
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[2] Versus acceptable behaviors by 1994 standards.
