How to write a letter to Santa

A list of presents is the easy part, and it is also the part that gets forgotten fastest. What turns a letter into something a family keeps, sometimes for years, is what sits either side of the list: a detail about that particular year, a question put to Santa, a line only a child of that age, in that December, would have written.

The details that date a letter

A line naming the child's age, the school they are in, a pet, a house they have just moved into, or something that happened that fingerprint in a way a list of toys never can. A letter that says only "I want a bike and some Lego" could have been written by any child in any year. A letter that mentions losing a tooth in October, or the new baby, or the dog learning to sit, belongs to one particular child at one particular time, and that is exactly what makes it worth rereading later.

Leaving room for the child's own voice

The temptation, especially with a younger child, is to tidy the letter up: better spelling, neater sentences, a wish list that reads well. Resisting that is usually worth it. A letter written mostly in the child's own words, misspellings and all, tells a family more about that child at that age than a polished version ever will, and it is often the misspellings that get quoted back, fondly, years afterwards.

A question works just as well as a statement. Children sometimes ask Santa something: how the reindeer manage the whole night, what the workshop looks like, whether he gets cold. Those questions do not need an answer written back. They just need to be allowed onto the page, because they are often the part of the letter that stays with a family longest.

A letter to Santa does not need to look tidy. A child old enough to hold a pencil can write it themselves, however uneven the lines, and the unevenness is usually the part a parent keeps coming back to years later. For a child not yet writing, dictating the letter while an adult writes it down works just as well: the words are still theirs, even if the hand belongs to someone else.

Whose handwriting goes on the page

There is no fixed rule here. Some families let an older child write every word alone, spelling mistakes included. Others write the letter together, the adult forming the letters while the child chooses what goes in them. Either way, the point of keeping a paper letter rather than typing one is that it carries a record of a particular age: the size of the letters, the pressure of the pencil, the way a five-year-old writes their name compared with how they'll write it at nine.

Drawings and decoration

A drawing of the sleigh, the workshop, or the reindeer sits naturally alongside the writing, and for a child who finds sentences hard going, a picture can say what words cannot. Simple decoration works better than elaborate: a drawn stamp in the corner, a border of holly round the edge, a wax-crayon rubbing of a coin pressed through the paper. None of it needs to be neat.

The envelope can be decorated the same way, sealed however the child likes, and addressed in whatever form the family has settled on. What matters is that the letter, once finished, looks like something a child made. That is usually what makes it worth keeping.

Once the letter is finished, families tend to settle into one of a few small rituals, and most of them matter more for what they do to an evening than for what they do to a piece of paper.

Reading it aloud before it goes anywhere

Many parents read the letter back to the child who wrote it, or have the child read it themselves if they are old enough. It turns a private bit of writing into a shared one, and it is often the moment a child adds something they had forgotten, a line about the dog or a thank you for last year. If reading aloud well is something you want to think about more generally, that is covered on its own page.

Leaving it out on Christmas Eve

The most common practice is simply to leave the letter somewhere visible on Christmas Eve, a mantelpiece, a windowsill, propped against a plate left out for supper. Some families leave it there overnight and quietly put it away afterwards; others keep it out until the child notices it has gone. There is no correct version of this. The point of leaving it out is the leaving.

Older customs behind the habit

The idea of sending a letter up rather than out is older than the postal system. In parts of continental Europe, children traditionally burned their letters in the fireplace so the words would travel as smoke, a practical answer in an age before reliable postage and one that still turns up in some British households as a small piece of theatre.

Keeping it, rather than sending it anywhere

A good number of families keep the letter instead, tucked into a box or a drawer, and take it out years later. Read next to a letter from an earlier Christmas, a child's handwriting and their concerns from one year to the next become their own small record, which is often the part that turns out to matter most once the child has grown past the age of writing them.

None of this requires anything from you beyond paper, a pen, and an evening. There is no form to fill in and nothing on this site collects the letter or anything written on it.