It turns out letters written to Santa Claus — almost 30 years ago — can go home again.
During a recent deep clean at the Perry, ME, Post Office, employees found a stash of “Dear Santa” letters dating back to 1995. The batch of letters had been processed, received and answered, then stored away and forgotten in an old cabinet.
Postmaster Charles Curtis recognized that several of the senders were now adults or had family members still living in the small town near Canadian border. He mulled over what to do with the letters and then thought how meaningful it would be to reunite them with the original senders.
“I thought it would be neat and sentimental to receive,” he said. “And everybody we have given them to is enjoying them and getting a good laugh at what they wished for back then.”
However, one letter was particularly poignant for parents who lost their son in a canoe accident in 2015 when he was 23 years old.
That letter to Santa was written by 3-year-old Majik Francis with the help of his father, Dute. The little boy listed the gifts he was wishing for, which included a pair of black ice skates, puzzles, coloring books, crayons and a “choo-choo train set (a red one).”
Majik also explained in the letter that he would “be good at home and at daycare. I’ll learn to listen to my parents. I will stop biting my fingernails.”
Curtis gave the letter back to Majik’s mother, Cyril, when she recently stopped by the Post Office. Her reaction was reported in The Quoddy Tides, a local newspaper.
“The Post Office found it and knew I’d want it,” she said. “I immediately started crying.”
Majik’s letter to Santa now has a place among many fond family memories of him. It has also been shared with his son. Cyril also made a recording of herself reading the letter with an explanation of its bittersweet return.
“I sent the audio clip to my daughter. It was a tearjerker for her, too,” she said.
“It was there all this time,” Cyril told the newspaper, and made its way back to family at just the right moment.
