Children write to Santa and ask him for bicycles, new dolls and a little help in making their wildest dreams come true. Most adults, on the other hand, don’t take to pen and paper addressed to Mr. Claus anymore, but maybe we should. One adult did and got the gift of a little peace (and a good laugh) in return.
South Africa (15 December 2024) — All my friends who have been to therapy have found that there’s a unique brand of peace in writing a letter, writes Good Things Guy’s Ashleigh.
Some wrote letters to parents who could’ve done better. Others to their past selves or lovers gone by. The point, they all told me, isn’t to send the letter and have it be read. It isn’t to get an answer, either.
“What was the point then?”, I’d enquire time and time again. The answer was always the same: “You find out once you’re done writing.” I reconciled this as waiting for a gift that may or may not come. That coupled with the lack of response; the effort sounded a lot like writing a letter to Santa to me.
So I gave it a go.
And somewhere, in reconnecting with my old friend Mr. C, I learned exactly what they meant.
The point was and always has been to give our frustrations, anger, hurt and hope a tangible space and a faraway place to go. Because we all need that as we get older. And maybe, just maybe, Santa could use a letter from his old pals, too:
Dear Santa: We Need to Talk
Dear Santa,
It’s been a while since we last touched base. I believe that the last time I sent a letter your way, I was in the market for a Nintendo DS (like every other 90s kid). Thanks for that one, by the way. I regret to inform you that I have neglected to feed my Nintendogs for well over 15 years, and still feel guilty about that from time to time.
I stopped writing after that Christmas because the other kids made fun of people who did. But, I’m a lot older now and I doubt I’ll get teased (maybe just given a few skew eyeballs, but hey, the great thing about growing up is you really learn to give less of a fudge).
Santa, I’ve got a bone to pick with you. The festive season isn’t quite what it used to be. Adulthood is nothing like the rom-coms from the early 2000s; I’ve got the knees of an 89-year-old, have realised that dentist appointments do not, in fact, get easier with age and have an upstairs neighbour who won’t stop moving their furniture in the middle of the night.
I’ve had to become my own psychologist, know way too much about the dangers of sugar and spend a significant portion of my life overthinking whether to use exclamation points in emails.
Any free time I get to myself is spent choosing between whether I have the strength to go to the gym (just to maybe get a free smoothie and stop my gym app from bullying me), or whether to do the dishes that are stacking up and laugh like an evil assembly when they touch my weary hands at the end of a long day.
Don’t even get me started on the painful realisation that I spent all those years doing maths only to never be asked what the quadratic formula was again, or the fact that everything I learnt about tax was from ChatGPT.
I don’t even have kids, but raising all the different stages of myself has me feeling like Lynette from Desperate Housewives.
Yes, a lot has changed.
I live in fear of spending the festive season in the hospital again. And I miss the pets I’ll never celebrate another Christmas with. And I only see my family a few times a year.
And a friend died a few days ago.
So here’s the deal Santa: I think you should extend your target market.
Us adults, well, we could use a little magic, too.
Now I’m not saying we’re trying to completely revamp your brand. We don’t need excess deliveries of new TVs or Yuppiechef crockery (unless you’re feeling generous, that is).
But I do think it’d be pretty sweet if us adults could send you a different kind of list.
A list of our fears, worries, hopes and dreams. A space for the things we haven’t said aloud. A home for our grief.
No word count. No real roadmap. No pressure. It’d just be between us and you.
See, a lot of us are really busy. And we don’t have the time to chat to our friends who are also really busy. Some of us have kids, and some of us have three jobs. Some adults feel really alone despite how social media makes us seem, and some of us haven’t had a moment to ourselves in years.
You don’t need to reply (I know that’s never really been your style), but if you could spare an ear (we implore you to enjoy our letters over a glass of milk and cookies), well, I think a lot of people would feel a little lighter. And maybe after we’ve got all that coal out of our systems, we might just remember what it felt like when we wrote to you the first time.
Sincerely,
Every adult
by 
I loved the letter to Santa. It is heartwarming and I think Mr Claus ponder on it quite seriously ❤️❤️