Harriet from Perth, Australia
Dear Mrs. Claus,
My name is Harriet and I am nine years old and I live in Perth, Western Australia, which my dad says is the most isolated city in the world, which I looked up and it is actually true. I have three questions. I am writing to you instead of Santa because my brother says Santa is too busy and also because I think you probably know more anyway.
What are Santa's favourite cookies?
Is the North Pole a real place?
Why does everyone celebrate Christmas differently?
Thank you.
Harriet Joan Fletcher
Perth, Western Australia
Dear Harriet,
What a perfectly constructed letter. Three questions, a name, a location, and a thank you. No unnecessary padding. No diplomatic softening of the questions. I have been receiving correspondence at the North Pole for a very long time and I want to tell you that most people, adults included, take considerably longer to get to the point. Your brother is correct that Santa is busy. You are also correct that I know more. These two things are related. Please sit down. I have answers.
Santa's favourite cookies are Scottish shortbread. He will not always admit this because he is diplomatic about the cookies left by families everywhere and he does not want anyone to feel that their chocolate chip was unappreciated, because it was not — it was genuinely appreciated and consumed completely. But if you ask me directly, which you have, the answer is shortbread. Plain, proper, buttery Scottish shortbread made with real butter, not margarine. Santa has been eating cookies in every country on Earth for several centuries and he always comes back to shortbread. He says it is the most honest cookie — it is not trying to be anything other than what it is, and what it is happens to be excellent. I respect this position. It is also mine.
In Australia, where Christmas is in summer and the temperatures in Perth on December 24th can exceed 35 degrees, families sometimes leave cold drinks and Tim Tams alongside the traditional cookies. Santa accepts Tim Tams with genuine enthusiasm and has done so since their introduction in 1964. He considers the Tim Tam Slam — where you bite both ends and use the biscuit as a straw for hot tea — one of the great Australian contributions to world culture. Do not tell the elves I said this. They have been attempting it with hot cocoa and the structural integrity issues have become a workshop safety matter.
Now. The North Pole.
Yes, Harriet, the North Pole is a real place. It is the northernmost point on Earth, sitting at 90 degrees north latitude, at the top of the Arctic Ocean. Unlike the South Pole, which sits on a continent — Antarctica, which you may know is not very far from Perth in the grand scheme of southern hemisphere geography — the North Pole sits on frozen sea ice, which means there is no land beneath it. It is ocean, frozen solid, sitting at the top of the world.
This creates certain practical complications for a permanent workshop operation, which the elves have resolved through methods that the North Pole's engineering team considers proprietary and which I consider, after several centuries of watching the solutions evolve, genuinely impressive. What I will tell you is that the ice at the North Pole is real, the cold is real, the dark in December is real — the sun does not rise at all during winter, which means Christmas Eve happens in complete darkness — and the address is real. Whether everything else at the North Pole is real is a question I will leave for Santa to answer, as it falls more naturally within his area of responsibility than mine.
Perth, which your father correctly identifies as the most isolated city in the world by distance from the nearest comparable city, is in some ways the opposite of the North Pole. You have sunshine we do not have. You have warmth we actively lack. You are surrounded by ocean in a way that is geographic rather than frozen. And yet letters from Perth arrive at the North Pole every December with the same questions, the same wishes, and the same genuine hope that someone at the other end of the world is reading carefully. We are. Distance, it turns out, is not the obstacle it appears to be when the intention is strong enough.
Your third question is the largest one and I am going to give it the space it deserves.
First, what Christmas actually is. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem — a miraculous birth, announced by angels, attended by shepherds who came in from the fields and wise men who followed a star across the desert, and welcomed into the world in a stable because there was no room anywhere else. This is the centre of Christmas. Not the cookies, not the sleigh, not the lights, not even the very handsome man I am married to. The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem is what the day is about, and I want to be clear about that before I say anything else, because everything else only makes sense once you understand that the original gift of Christmas was not under a tree — it was in a manger, in a small town in Judea, two thousand years ago, and it changed the world so completely that people on the other side of the planet in a city called Perth, Western Australia are still marking it today.
Now. Why does everyone celebrate it differently.
Because people are different everywhere, and people do not abandon who they are when they adopt a celebration — they bring who they are into it. As Christianity spread across the world, it met cultures and traditions that already had their own ways of marking midwinter with light and generosity. The two things merged. They always merge. Culture does not stay still and neither do celebrations.
In Nigeria, Christmas is heat and music and the whole street celebrating together loudly. In Poland, Christmas Eve begins with the first star and involves twelve meatless dishes. In Japan, Christmas is largely secular and the traditional meal, through an extraordinary sequence of events in the 1970s involving a marketing campaign, is Kentucky Fried Chicken. In Australia, Christmas is a barbecue in the garden in December sunshine with cold drinks and, in your household, Tim Tams left out for a man in a red suit who is quietly very pleased about it.
None of these is the correct Christmas. All of these are the correct Christmas. The core of the celebration — the idea that this particular time of year is worth marking with generosity, with family, with food shared and light kept burning against the dark — that core is the same everywhere. Everything around it is the particular way a particular people decided to say: this matters, we are here, we are glad to be here together. I find every version of it moving. After several centuries of watching, I have not become less moved. I consider this a good sign.
Thank you for writing to me directly, Harriet. It does not happen as often as it should. Santa gets the letters and the milk and the cookies and the songs and the films and the entire global operation named after him, and I get the clipboard and the satisfaction of knowing that none of it would function without the clipboard. Your letter is, therefore, a particular pleasure. Three excellent questions, answered as honestly as I know how.
Make the shortbread, if you can. Real butter. No margarine. Santa will know the difference. He always does.
Warmly,
Mrs Claus
The North Pole
P.S. Your brother was right that Santa is busy. He was wrong that this was a reason not to write. Being busy is never a reason not to ask a good question. File this away. It will be useful later. https://santaclaus.top/mrs-claus-answers-the-questions/
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