LETTERS TO SANTA, 1958 AND 1959
“I pictured him taking the time to tie a string around the letters, marking them as special.”
When my brother was seven and I was three, our mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died the following year. Daddy told my aunt, “I'll never be happy again.” And he really wasn’t. He took care of us, but he didn’t seem to find joy or even much pleasure in doing so. He wasn’t nurturing like our mother would have been. We always felt we were second fiddle—to his work, to his plans, to his grief. He was a poor widower with two small children, whereas we still had him, so his grief trumped ours. He was not sentimental about us.
A few years after our mother died, Daddy married again, but it wasn’t what we had hoped and in time they divorced. He tried once more, and the third marriage lasted 34 years, although to me it seemed more about convenience than love. When Daddy died, 14 years ago, at 85, his wife, Christine, told my brother and me, “You two take what you want. I’m going to get rid of everything else and go live near my kids.”
After the funeral, we spent three days sorting through all of Daddy’s stuff. He was a saver. He’d been an electrical engineer and had saved awards, clippings and photos from 40 years of work and friendships. Boxes and boxes of pens from conventions he’d attended and companies he’d done business with. Boxes of napkins and matchbooks from trips he’d taken with Christine. Jars of bent nails he’d laboriously straightened. Twenty-five brand new toothbrushes. Bank statements by the hundreds. Underwear worn so thin, you could have read a newspaper through it. Bits of twine rolled into a ball the size of a grapefruit.
We eventually filled 11 black Hefty trash bags, made three large cartons for Goodwill and divvied up the boxes we’d crammed with papers and folders and photo albums when we were rushing willy-nilly at the end—agreeing to go through them at our respective houses and discard or share as we saw fit. We took nine boxes each. I stashed mine in my garage, thinking I’d tackle them quickly and be done with it. But I couldn’t bring myself to open a single one. I was angry at my father for having saved so much junk yet so little of anything that had to do with my brother or me. It was his whole life, and we hardly seemed a part of it.
Last year, at my husband’s behest, I finally began to go through the boxes. The first ones I opened contained 20 photo albums, their pictures neatly labeled in Daddy’s meticulous hand. Only one album had pictures—just a few—of me and my children; most of the rest were of him and Christine. An entire album was devoted to his retirement party.
Maybe six or seven boxes in, I got to one that included a faded manila envelope sealed with tape. Inside were letters and cards my brother and I had sent Daddy through the years: Father’s Day cards, poems, notes we had written him. This didn’t seem especially special—he saved cards and notes from everyone. But beneath all these, tied with a frayed string, were letters we had written to Santa Claus, and when I saw them, I burst right into tears.
He hadn’t saved all our letters to Santa—just the ones from 1958 and 1959, the Christmases one month before and 11 months after our mother died. It must have touched him: our childish wonder and innocence in a time of such great sadness. Dear Santa, I hope that I have been good enough to deserve these things I want. I thought of him reading those words, the tenderness he must have felt. I pictured him taking the time to tie a string around the letters, marking them as special. If they were special, then we must have been too.
When I showed my husband this letter—the one from 1958—he said, “Did you get your cowgirl outfit?” I did not. But when I opened that sixth or seventh box, I got the gift I’d longed for my whole life. My father’s love was in that box.
—Nancy Malcolm
Nancy Malcolm is a writer, photographer and retired educator living in Austin, Texas. Her memoir-in-progress is titled I Thought It Was You.
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That string, a heart string. 🙏
This is just beautiful. Thank you, Nancy.