A couple of fellows in NY recived all of Santa's letters this year
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December 24, 2010, 9:03 am
Did He Leave a Forwarding Address? Yes, the North Pole
By SARAH KLEIN
The theme of the party was Christmas 1962; when I opened the door to Jim and Dylan’s apartment in Chelsea, I felt as if I had been transported back in time. Their place was draped in white lights and evergreen boughs, strewn with lines of pastel ornaments and 1960s Christmas wrap.
As I made my way through the crowd, I heard rumblings of approval, but above all of the talk of the décor, I began to hear rumblings of a different sort.
“Have you seen the letters?” I overheard a girl in a hair-sprayed beehive ask her friend, who was wearing a skinny tie.
“Have you seen the letters?” I heard when I waited to get myself a spiced eggnog and some shrimp cocktail.
I was intrigued, and when Jim, our tall, rosy-cheeked, cardigan-clad host, came barreling up to me, I had to ask: “Jim, what are these letters everyone is talking about?”
The look on his face changed. It was as if I had asked him about the health of an older relative or the state of the war. He led me into a small study off to the side. When I walked into the room, I saw what looked to be hundreds of letters tied into small bundles with red and green yarn. I looked closer at the stacks; they were all addressed to Santa. These were letters with Jim and Dylan’s exact 22nd Street address, including “Apt. 7,” but all addressed to Santa Claus.
Jim did his best to explain. He told me that for the past few years, he and Dylan had received a few letters addressed to Santa and had always assumed it was because of a mistaken address. They ignored them. But this year, the tally was nearing 400 letters — with 20 to 40 new ones arriving each day. They had done every Internet search they could think of trying to link their address to something that might explain it, like the Postal Service or Macy’s, but they had come up with nothing.
He did not know why; he did not know how. He just knew that they were sitting on hundreds of letters to Santa and that the ones he had opened had moved him so much, he had to do something about it.
Jim handed me a letter to read:
Hi Santa,
My name is Jennifer and my little sister’s name is Stephanie. I’m 8½ years old and Stephanie is 7 years. Santa our behavior this year have been excellent. You can ask my mom if you want. Please Santa bring me some clothes. I’m 10T and my shoe size is 4 and Stephanie is 8T shoes size 2½. Please make my dreams come true for Christmas.
I imagined that there were hundreds more just like this one in those stacks. Where did they come from, and how would they get fulfilled? It was as if Jim and Dylan were being challenged by Santa himself.
“I don’t know how we ended up with all of these,” Jim said, and he began straightening the letters. “We just have to figure out what to do next.”
There were just two weeks left until Christmas, and both Jim and Dylan were in a state of semi-paralysis.
They had handed out a few letters to friends to answer, but not nearly enough to make a dent in the pile. Each day when one of them would check the mail more letters would fall out of the box.
One option: Take the letters to the Main Post Office, where they would be added to the thousands of other letters sent to Santa each year. Thoughtful strangers, in a perfect world, would pick them up and buy the letter writers gifts.
But Jim imagined the worst: “If we bring them back to the post office, are all the kids getting a letter back with ‘Return to Sender’? I don’t want that to happen.”
So Jim and Dylan came up with their own solution, one I sought to capture in our video.
They lost interest in finding out just why they were getting all these letters. But I didn’t. I did a bit of sleuthing. I reached out to three people who had sent letters. The first person I called said that she got the address, along with a few others, from a teacher in an English as a Second Language class in the Bronx. The teacher said that if they wrote the address, Santa might write them back. The woman on the phone would not give the teacher’s name or the location of the school. The second phone call led me to a mother who said she got the address on the post office Web site when she typed in Santa. I had her wait on the phone while I tried it and found nothing. I asked her to send me a link and did not hear back from her after a couple of attempts. The third woman said that her daughter got the address at her school, but when I called the school they claimed to know nothing about an address in Chelsea.
And so the reason remains a mystery. And Jim and Dylan are gearing up for next year.
Taken from the NY Times
I just really wanted to share this story with everyone I knew.
If only everyone acted in such a selfless manner, Christmas might then be a state of mind all through out the year rather than a holiday come and gone from year to year.
