In the Author’s Note, Macomber shares a story about how this story came to be, a brief question of an eleven-year-old girl, her husband’s cousin’s granddaughter, a girl who had decided she wanted to write books. When she asked this young girl when she decided she wanted to write books, her answer was “I knew when I started writing Santa letters.’
This story begins when Lindy Carmichael heads home for Christmas, with two full weeks to spend with her family before she has to return to her job in Seattle. Her dream job.
Lindy arrives, and soon after her mother shares an old shoe box with Lindy, containing some of Lindy’s things, including her letters to Santa. At first she can’t understand why her mother kept this, and isn’t interested in reading them, but her mother insists. Opening the box, she reads what she had written in her first letter to Santa, written when she was five:
’Dear Santa,
Please bring me a daddy.
Lindy’
She continues to rummage through the box, and discovers the other letters to Santa, including one saying that he ’should give Billy Kincade coal. He’s mean. He pulls my hair at school and chases me at recess.’
When she’s finished reading all her old letters to Santa, her mother tells her that she thinks that Lindy needs to write another letter to Santa, that ’maybe a letter letting him know what you’d like most this Christmas is exactly what you need to do. And write it with the same trust you had as a child.’ She takes her advice, and as the days go by she struggles with leaving these people behind, but she is also completely dedicated to the job she’s worked so hard for the success she’s achieved there, and can’t imagine uprooting her life in Seattle.
This is a sweet story, if perhaps slightly predictable, but enjoyable nevertheless.