Meet the People Who Respond to Emails to Santa Claus

In 1991, Jeff Westover married his wife and became a stepfather to a five-year-old daughter who had not grown up believing in Santa Claus. "That was my first real parental challenge," Westover told me. "How do I convince this very bright five-year-old child that Santa Claus is somebody she needs to know about and have as part of her tradition?" He decided to direct his all of his stepdaughter's questions to an "elf" at the North Pole, who he had respond to her via the fax machine located in his home office. His stepdaughter loved it—she brought these responses to school to show her friends, and before long other parents started reaching out to Westover to find out how they too could receive these faxes for their own children.

Today, Westover's ruse has expanded into MyMerryChristmas, a website that, in addition to fielding emails to Santa, also features a holiday radio station, an interactive "Santa tracker," as well as a message board for users to bond over their mutual holiday cheer. His site, like many others, has changed the face of what it means to write a letter to Santa.

When you were a child, you probably wrote your Christmas list in the form of a letter to Santa Claus, which your mom or dad would then address to the North Pole, and drop off at the post office. The US Postal Service maintains a "Letters from Santa" program, which helps parents write their own responses as Santa, while both the British and Canadian postal services send back automated letters from Santa Claus for the kids who write to him. But we live in the age of the internet, and so now there are a whole number of websites such as Westover's that allow kids to send messages to Santa, only to get a response more or less immediately.

Some of these sites are run by volunteers, and started from a simple desire to help kids enjoy the spirit of Christmas. Alan Kerr—the self-described "Head Elf" behind EmailSanta—was inspired by the 1997 Canadian postal strike, in which 45,000 postal workers refused to deliver mail until their wages and work rules were renegotiated. Speaking over the phone, Kerr told me how upset his sister's son was when he found out that he wouldn't be able to mail a letter to Santa. Figuring that there had to be something he could do to improve the situation, he looked to the then "pretty new" internet as his saving grace. "I was just kind of fooling around with it to see what I could do," he recalled. "So I just set something quick up and sent [my sister] the link."

EmailSanta has grown much larger over its 18 years. After his nephew received his first email reply from Santa, the site "went viral—even though they didn't use that phrase [back then]." During the first two weeks of the site's existence, EmailSanta received 1000 emails. Today, Kerr says, his site gets about a million emails every Christmas season.

Kerr, who runs EmailSanta with help from volunteers that he refers to as "elves," told me, "Back in the day, just getting an email back from Santa was like WOW. But kids learn fast and their expectations grow quickly."

These expectations required that Kerr add a new feature to his website. Now, after filling in the prescribed blanks using the site's email widget, users are given the option to "see their email being sent through the internet to the North Pole and dropped down through Santa's chimney into his office," and then receive an email back instantly.

The appeal of these sites is not even just limited to kids, says Kat Long, the president of Brenash-Derian, an e-marketing firm that is also behind ALetter4Santa. When discussing the kinds of messages she gets, Long explained that sometimes they get messages from adults who just need a place to vent. "We have adults who are kind of on the down and out. They're sad because they lost their job or they don't have the money they want for Christmas." And, of course, sometimes adults just want gifts too. "They want iPods, and they want new TVs, and they want their boyfriends to come back to them," she jokes.

Running these sites is not always enjoyable. Westover told me that the Christmas after 9/11, "was extremely difficult because [the attacks] were on television and everyone was involved and invested with it."

Kerr, meanwhile, told me he's received messages from kids that indicate they're troubled or even facing abuse. "When Santa reads [emails like those]," he said, "there's a special page he sends to children, just in case, so that they can talk to people and get special help."

Last Christmas, a few kids from Vietnam visited the EmailSanta Facebook page to ask Santa directly why he forgot to visit them and leave presents. Kerr lamented that "dealing with disappointment" is "one of the more difficult parts of the job" of playing Santa. He tries to reply to these comments with words of encouragement, relying on the Santa legend that jolly ole Saint Nick "doesn't bring presents to everyone even though he tries" as a means to make sure that every kid knows that Santa still loves them.

And even if the job is hard or can get depressing, the idea that a kid can send Santa an email and get one back is sort of incredible, and that's why the people who run these sites do it. "It's a tradition," Westover told me when I asked about how it has felt to donate his free time to maintain the MyMerryChristmas site for a quarter of a century. "It's part of what makes Christmas for us."

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