It’s a favorite tradition for lots of children to send letters to Santa, but J.R.R. Tolkien’s children instead received letters from Santa Claus. Every year, they received an envelope that bore a North Pole postmark, containing a letter handwritten in strange, spidery script, complete with sketches and color drawings. They discovered incredible tales of life at the polar workshop — and each letter was signed by Father Christmas himself.
It was, of course, Tolkien assuming the guise of Santa. For more than 20 years — starting in 1920, when Tolkien’s oldest child, John, was 3 years old — he carefully crafted the annual letter, instilling each one with the same imagination and wonder that defined his most famous works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The tradition continued through the childhoods of his three other children, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla.
Tolkien unleashed his creative genius in his fantastical Christmas correspondence by crafting an entire mythology around Father Christmas and his household, with a cast of memorable characters including the North Polar Bear and his two nephews, Paksu and Valkotukka, and Santa’s clever Elven secretary, Ilbereth. And while Santa did most of the writing, sometimes his friends took over, using their own distinctive scripts. When, for example, the North Polar Bear added a note, it was written in a thick scrawl due to his large paws, with his spelling mistakes attributed to the fact that his first language was Arktik — the mythical tongue spoken at the North Pole — instead of English.
These delightful Yuletide letters were preserved and later published in Letters From Father Christmas, a volume posthumously released in 1976, three years after Tolkien’s death. Edited by Baillie Tolkien, the wife of Christopher Tolkien, the beautiful book contains the letters, drawings, and envelopes that came from Tolkien’s Santa. It’s a charming collection — one that reveals both Tolkien’s extraordinary creativity and the lengths he went to as a father to imbue his family’s Christmases with priceless childhood wonder.
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