This week’s Dear Santa writings come from Nancy Levinson, Christy Schwan, Barbara Simmons, and Mona Anderson.  I hope you enjoy reading them.

Nancy Levinson, Dear Santa

Dear Santa (s)

I am scrambling through photo albums and shoeboxes of
collected letters, pictures, magazine and newspaper clippings,
searching for a note I left for you on our fireplace mantel
long ago.  From a scrapbook of my mother’s, I took possession
of that note years later.

It was a snowy night in Minnesota.  I was four YO and able
to print big letters.  (My mother read to me early on).
That evening she and my father seemed to have approved
my leaving out a plate of cookies and a cup of cocoa
with a marshmallow afloat — so you would have a treat
exactly like my favorite winter treat.

That ‘gift’ was approved since we didn’t celebrate Christmas,
but Chanukah.  It seems that I welcomed you as I’d heard
other children and possibly our radio, as well as observing holiday
decorations here and there.  Whether or not I expected you to
slide down our chimney, I can’t say.  I think, though,
you were as real to me as the Sandman and Snow White.

Apparently, I did not want to mislead you as to our holiday
beliefs and sought to let you in on the secret or maybe
simply to tell the truth.  My penciled note on a scrap of paper:
dear santa these peepel are jewish.

Throughout your existence you’ve brought joy to millions of
children.  But currently you have flourished beyond your former
self in picture and costumed lap in shops and malls now offering
inclusion and loving care to millions more. . . those of different abilities,
different shapes and sizes, different colored skin. . . as it ought to be.

For this, Santas, I give thanks and express buoyancy of my hopes
for more children in this world.

So I still can’t find my note.  Perhaps I imagined that I took
possession of it.  Perhaps after you had the cookies and cocoa,
you put it in your pocket and thought about it as you flew
on your way across a vast snowy sky.

With loving care,

Nancy

***

Christy Schwan, Gone Away

why, oh why?
have rye Triscuits
gone missing from
grocery shelves
across the heartland

swapped out with
trendy, improbable flavors
dill sea-salt, fire-roasted tomato
tzatziki, avocado cilantro lime
with or without chia seeds

we’ve googled and amazoned
scoured Costco and Target and Kroger
sent expeditions to neighboring states
we’re ready to knock the smile off
Piggly Wiggly’s face

my family’s taste is simple
salami and swiss on
caraway seed sprinkled
rye Triscuits–full size or mini
microwaved ‘til melty

Santa, please
stuff our stockings full
of those savory crackers
even if the expiration date
is pre-pandemic

***

Barbara Simmons, Dear Santa

Dear Santa,

This year, I’ve seen you sitting in your wonderful garb behind glass partitions. You are greeting, in our world now very familiar with COVID precautions, all the children whose parents decided that an ‘in person’ visit with you would be a welcome departure from your remote interactions of the 2020 holiday season.

My current message to you, though, is taking shape on my computer (a departure from the crayon-scrawled messages of my childhood), but still draws on energies of someone who perhaps has always known that my wants and needs (my Christmas ‘wish’ list) were never as important to me as the magic of this season.

So, this year, I’ve taken some time to reflect on what I am feeling about Christmas – and it has taken me back, Santa, to my early parenting years when I would ask my sons for absolutely nothing if they would only not ‘bicker’ with each other for at least a few days, and especially on Christmas.

Now that both Jimmy and Brad (in their 40’s) live far from me, Santa, I know that you’d have to travel to Poland and Mexico (not too difficult for you, a world traveler) to gift them my wishes. I would want my sons to have love in their lives that is true and sincere, that is given unconditionally by their significant others. That they would begin to know (as I have learned) that this season of loving should never be overwhelmed by the commercialism of the season accompanied with ‘rushing around’ and ‘doing’. Rather, let them know that Christmas is the season of caring, of being ‘alongside of’ and ‘with’, of watching classic Christmas films like “It’s a Wonderful Life” – and believing that the sound of a bell tinkling can mean an angel is getting her wings.

While I might not leave cookies for you anymore on my hearth, nor look for smudges of the fireplace ashes on the notes you would leave for me to find on Christmas Day, I hope this letter to you, which I’ll ‘cyberspace send’ once I’m finished typing, will show you that you have given me much over the years. I don’t think a list of things is what I want to share with you, but I will share some moments that were special to me.

Each of my sons’ first Christmases was special. I made their Christmas stockings, one a felt-applique stocking for Jimmy and one a latch-hook stocking (so large that Brad actually could fit inside it!) And, in keeping with my family tradition, there was always something sweet inside (the orange in the toe of the stocking) as a prelude to the hoped-for sweetness of a new year.

You helped me get through the first Christmas I spent after my mother had died – when I still kept her elegant stocking on the mantel, remembering that her gifts to me reached far beyond one day – and that her wit, charm, and good sense about life helped me through other Christmases that were sometimes ‘blue’.

After my divorce, when my children were just 1 and 4, you helped me share Christmas with my sons when we went caroling in our neighborhood, when we went on our annual ‘Christmas’ tree hunt in the Santa Cruz mountains, each of us choosing one new ornament a year to decorate our tree – hoping you would take a rest by it on your visit to our house, enjoying the simple charm of our decorations.

When I remarried – by this time my children were out of college – you were there with my new husband and our new traditions – our asking each other how we wanted to spend time together, our greatest gift at this point in our lives.

We still send gifts and cards, Santa, and there will be video chats this year with our sons, but what I will ask of you is simple. Please continue to share with me reminders that, as Rumi wrote, ‘the quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.’ That gift of quiet, of the splendor of solitude. The gift of loving conversations, of the joy of shared laughter. The gift of wonder, of keeping the mystery of this season as a sacred path to accepting that not knowing is essential to living fully. All these are gifts I ask of you, dear Santa, and I will promise to savor, to keep, and to pass all of them along….

With love,

Barbara Simmons

***

Mona Anderson, Some Traditions Are Meant to Be Unbroken

Dear Santa,

I know you like to slide down chimneys and put gifts under trees, so I want you to know that we cleaned our chimney this year and we’ll definitely have a tree.  With the world so topsy-turvy I thought you should know that a tree is one tradition we’ll keep.  We’ve lost some, like Christmas Eve at my mother’s where she would put on an ooh and ahh Martha Stewart spread.  Since she died, we just stay home and watch T.V.

And then there’s the tree.  You know, Santa, my partner has been wanting to skip the tree.  “Let’s just put lights on the giant schefflera,” Joe says, only half-joking.

“But the grandchildren are coming.  They’ll be disappointed,” I say.  “I’ll be disappointed.”

The tree is always an issue.  Where will we put it in our tiny house?  More importantly, where will we get it?

We don’t buy a tree.  We live in the country and for years planted our own baby fir seedlings each fall.  Until we didn’t and they grew tall and straight into the sky beyond indoor Christmas tree height.  Then we trekked into our backwoods to find a reasonable facsimile growing wild on the back hill.

But, we’re older now and climbing a mile up in the ice and snow with fallen trees blocking the trail is foolish, and around our house the pickings are slim.  For years now, our trees have been, shall we say, less than perfect.  Way less than perfect.  In fact, some years Joe drills holes in the trunk to stick more branches in between to fill it out, to make it look more like a “real” tree.  I’ll bet, Santa, that you didn’t even notice.

When I was growing up my parents bought magical, perfect trees in the grocery store parking lot.  Except once.  My father, never particularly handy around the house, always insisted that getting the tree was his contribution to our Christmas preparations.  One year he was away so mom and I went to the tree lot.  We stood them up, examined each one from all sides, and finally, proudly, chose the perfect tree.  We were sure my dad would be grateful.  He wasn’t.  And the tree was so crooked we couldn’t fit it into the tree stand.  We were all miserable.

Some traditions are meant to be unbroken.

I will admit that I’ve started to grumble about our spindly, misshapen Christmas offerings – usually trees with too few branches to even hang an ornament.  Joe hates to cut a tree.  He knows how long they take to grow.  This means that our Christmas tree is never the best we can find, and for me, he agrees to not cut the worst, either.  I’m tempted to go to the tree lot myself and just buy one already.  But, I don’t.  Guilt maybe.  And what if it’s crooked?

Over the years my two sons regularly made fun of our bare, oddly shaped trees.  But whenever I suggested we go somewhere to buy one, they balked.  “We can’t.  It’s our tradition,” they’d say.

So this time we cut a tall fir that was hidden by the others, and took its top, just large enough to put on a small card table.  “Now the other trees here will have more light,” he said to convince himself that taking this tree was a blessing.  Maybe it was.

As usual with our wild trees, six inches spanned from branch to branch.  I could see him through it when he held it up.  I stared at it for hours wondering how to make it magical.

I tenderly wrapped it in miniature, white lights, then added small gold stars and angels, elegant clear glass icicles, gold and silver balls, and wrapped the bottom in soft, white cotton.  White, gold, and silver.  Perfect on our imperfect tree.  It’s angelic, I thought.

I sent a photo to my now-grown sons.  They sent back photos of theirs, one commenting on his own thick, elegantly coiffed tree, “Here’s ours.  Right off the tree lot.  No character.  You can’t even see the back from the front.”  Ah, I thought, our trees have character.

Some traditions are meant to be unbroken.

So, please, dear Santa, slide down our clean chimney and put gifts under our tree, however misshapen or crooked it may be.

And enjoy the cookies and milk,

Mona