Letters to Santa

Dec 29, 20202 min read

This year has been tough. There has been a lot of pain, a lot of anger and a lot of grieving. And while 2021 looks promising to pull us all out of the slump that COVID plunged us into this past year, there is still no guarantee as to what will happen. Because of this and because everyone's holiday season was going to be affected some way by COVID, I wanted to figure out something that we could do to help in anyway possible.

The idea for this "Letters to Santa" program came out of a conversation I had with Andrea Dozier, Executive Director of the Southampton Youth Association when trying to brain storm on something we could do together this holiday season after working together to provide a safe and socially distant spooky walk for Halloween. To me, this program offered a lot more than just getting a cute collection of letters from kids about what they wanted from Santa. It was about discovering how COVID played a part in these kids holiday spirit. Would kids be able to move in stride with the way of the world right now and be able to ask for the normal run of the mill toys? Or would their minds be trapped being scared of how life is playing out and ask Santa to make COVID go away? What these kids wrote down provided not only a cute respite for us today to see what they wanted, but also in 50 or 100 years time when future employees of the Southampton History Museum want to look back at how COVID affected locals in Southampton, they can see what happened to the Christmas Spirit of some local kids.

(Some parts of the letters were redacted to hide addresses and last names)

Allison, 6 years old