Santa's Workshop News

Merry Christmas Images Dear Santa, My name is Sofia and I am eleven years old. I live in Phoenix, Arizona, where it is sunny and seventy degrees on Christmas Day every single year, which means our Christmas card pictures never have snow in them, which my cousin in Minnesota thinks is "not real Christmas," which I find extremely rude considering Phoenix has been around a lot longer than my cousin's opinion. For school we have to make a Christmas image for the art show and I started looking up "Merry Christmas images" online for ideas and there were millions of them and they all looked kind of the same — same red, same snow, same you, basically — and I started wondering why. I have three questions. Why do almost all Christmas images look the same, even though Christmas is celebrated so many different ways around the world? Why does Arizona have so many deserts and cactuses when other states do not? Why do certain images become "the" image of someth...

Lena from Ohio Asks Santa About Christmas Markets Dear Santa, My name is Lena and I am eleven years old. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio, and every December my family goes to the Cincinnati Christkindlmarkt downtown, where we drink hot chocolate and my dad always tries the bratwurst and says it is "almost as good as the real thing" even though he has never actually been to Germany, which my mom points out every single year and he ignores every single year. I have three questions. Where did Christmas markets actually come from and are they as old as they seem? Why do so many German towns claim to have "the oldest" Christmas market, and how do we know which one is really first? Why did European countries split into Catholic and Protestant regions, and did that affect how Christmas is celebrated? Thank you. Lena Marie Hoffmann Cincinnati, Ohio Dear Lena, Your father's annual bratwurst claim and your mother's annual correction of it is, I will tell you, o...

  Can you tell me about the Capitol Christmas Tree? Maya From Washington, D.C. Dear Santa, My name is Maya and I am ten years old. I live in Washington, D.C., which my dad says is the only city in America that is not actually part of any state, which I find slightly unfair to D.C. but also kind of cool, like we are our own thing. Every year my class takes a field trip to see the Capitol Christmas Tree and this year I had a lot of questions about it that nobody on the trip could answer. I have three questions. Why does the Capitol Christmas Tree come from a different state every single year instead of just staying the same tree like a normal Christmas tree? Why doesn't Washington, D.C. get to vote for president like the fifty states do, even though the Capitol is right here? Where exactly is Idaho, where this year's tree is from, and why is it shaped so strangely? Thank you. Maya Renee Thompson Washington, D.C. Dear Maya, A ten-year-old who notices that D.C. is ...

Nadia from Jakarta, Indonesia Wants to Know the Purpose of Christmas Dear Santa, My name is Nadia and I am eleven years old. I live in Jakarta, Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world by population, which my teacher told us with what I think was pride. My family is Muslim. We do not celebrate Christmas, but my apartment building has a Christmas tree in the lobby every December because some of our neighbours are Christian, and my best friend Clara is Catholic and her family invited me to see their nativity scene last year, which was beautiful and which I had many questions about. I have several questions for you. What is the actual purpose of Christmas? Why is Indonesia made of so many islands and how many are there really? Why do some countries have one main religion and others have many? Thank you. Nadia Putri Wijaya Jakarta, Indonesia Dear Nadia, A Muslim girl in Jakarta who went to see her Catholic friend's nativity scene and came away with genuine questio...

  How Fast Is Santa's Sleigh? How fast is Santa's sleigh? To deliver gifts to children all around the world in a single night, Santa's sleigh has to move faster than any aircraft, faster than sound, and faster than the human mind can easily picture. The exact speed is one of the North Pole's best-kept secrets, but a little thought about the size of the task reveals just how astonishing that velocity has to be. The speed is not about showing off. It exists for one reason: to make sure no child anywhere is ever missed. The math behind the miracle Consider the scale. There are hundreds of millions of homes to visit, spread across every continent and ocean, and only a single night to reach them all. Even if Santa spent the briefest possible moment at each stop, the distances between them would still require a sleigh that covers enormous stretches of the globe in the blink of an eye. Ordinary travel simply cannot account for it. This is where Christmas folklore offers its an...

The Real Spirit of Christmas Ho ho ho! Well now, my friends, we've come to the end of our story. And what a story it's been! We've traveled a long way together, haven't we? We met young Mary, brave enough to say yes. We met faithful Joseph, who simply did the right thing, again and again. We walked the long road to Bethlehem, knocked on every full door in town, and found shelter at last in a humble stable. We watched a baby laid in a manger. We stood with the shepherds as the sky lit up with angels. We followed a star across the world with the wise men, and we watched a jealous king's schemes come to nothing. We fled to Egypt and came home to Nazareth. And we learned that beautiful name, Emmanuel — God with us. So now let old Santa ask you the big question. After all of that, what is the real spirit of Christmas? It isn't the wrapping paper, my friends, lovely as it is. It isn't the tinsel or the twinkling lights, much as I adore them. It isn't even, if ...

Santa Explains How The Wise Men Began Their Journey Ho ho ho! So that magnificent star was blazing away in the eastern sky — and far across the world, those wise scholars I told you about made a rather bold decision. They were going to follow it. Now think about what that actually meant, my friends. These were important men. Learned men. Men with comfortable homes, respected positions, and busy schedules. They could very easily have looked up at that star, nodded thoughtfully, made a note of it in their charts, and gone right back to their warm dinners. But they didn't. They packed their bags, organized their caravans, gathered their gifts, and set off on a long and difficult journey to find a newborn King they had never met, in a country they did not know, simply because a star told them He had been born. That, my friends, takes a special kind of faith. And a special kind of curiosity, too. Now Santa knows all about long journeys — I cover an awful lot of ground myself, as you wel...