Letters to Santa, part 2

Ellie always writes very chatty letters to Santa. For instance, here's an excerpt from last year's letter:

Questions
1. How do you fit down a chiminey?
2. Why do you eat so much cookies?
3. How do you deliver all the toys in one night?

And here she is, aged six, two Christmases ago - 'How do you get down the chimne? I ges magic.'

So I was not at all surprised by her very chatty and curious letter to Santa this year. Here it is, spelling mistakes and all: 

Dear Santa
For Chrismas I would like a doll that comes with a horse. I also would like a book. I want to ask a few queistoins. Are any of your Elves sick? Will you come and feed the cookies to the reindear. Is your sleigh loud on the roof. I forget your reindears names, will you please leave a note in the letteres to Santa box with your eight reindears names on the paper. There is one more thing I want for Chrismas, I would like a pogo stik. Love, Ellie

In our house letters to Santa get folded and put in a little hanging letter box that goes on the tree, and they magically disappear on Christmas Eve. So I thought that this was just a normal cute and chatty letter, and I would probably have missed the part that asked for a response to the eight reindeer's names. 

A few days after Ellie wrote this letter, she mentioned to a perceptive babysitter that this was a test to see if Santa was real. If he wrote her a note back, she would know he was real, and if he didn't, well that just proved it was parents. 

I distinctly remember being about Ellie's age when I started to question who exactly was performing Father Christmas' duties. My three sisters and I rotated around sharing room and getting to spend six months at a time in the one single bedroom. This year I happened to be in the single room and so I set traps. Father Christmas delivered presents to the foot of our beds, and so I sprinkled talcum powder all over the floor to catch his footprints. I had recently read some kind of spy book and so I laid a single hair across something (the details are a bit fuzzy now!) to see if it would be disturbed, and most interestingly of all, I think I sellotaped my door shut so that when it was opened by my Dad in the night it would be obvious. Imagine my surprise when I woke up on Christmas morning to see that not only had presents been delivered, but that each of my traps was completely undisturbed, even the door. I couldn't believe it. I still don't know how he did it. And I was no longer pretty sure that it was parents!

So I was highly amused by Ellie's letter. And I knew I had to do the same thing for her! After an appeal on facebook and a discussion in which it was decided that Santa had to write in a man's 'old timey cursive' to be believable, I sourced a letter from Santa to Ellie. 

(Apologies for the fuzzy picture, my auto-focus decided to break on Christmas Day).

Santa answered every one of her questions, and knew exactly which presents had been delivered. And the end result, although she hasn't said too much, is that she's convinced again. And Adam, aged 10, informed me on Christmas Eve that he was 100% sure that Santa was real because there was video of him on the NORAD Santa tracker website. 

Thank you, NORAD and Facebook Santa. The magic of Christmas lives on!