Written either by Clement Moore or Henry Livingston (the authorship is contested) in the 19th century, this classic American poem established Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, as we know him today. The idea of Santa Claus dressed in red and white, and riding a sleigh drawn by reindeer every Christmas Eve delivering presents to children, comes from perhaps the best-known poem in the English language: The Night Before Christmas. I have tried to draw a picture of it: but I am too shaky to do it properly and you can’t paint fizzing light can you?’ (Copyright The Tolkien Estate Ltd, 1976.) You have never heard or seen anything like it. The aurora borealis, 1926: ‘Isn’t the North Polar Bear silly? … turned on all the Northern Lights for two years in one go. And although Tolkien retained the English name for his protagonist, there was a lot of popular American-derived folklore associated with his Father Christmas. Mark Twain famously wrote a letter from “Santa Claus” to his elder daughter, Susie Clemens. Tolkien was not the first author to produce letters from Father Christmas for his children. In 2018, the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford will exhibit the letters, alongside other manuscripts, artwork, maps, letters and artefacts from Tolkien collections around the world. It would be written in his spidery hand (he would, after all, be a very old man) and illustrated with funny scenes from life in the North Pole. So inevitably, his family traditions were something rather special.Įvery year, from 1920 to 1942, the Tolkien children – first John, and later Michael, Christopher and Priscilla – would receive a letter from Father Christmas. Yet this was a man whose rich imagination brought to life an entire world with thousands of years of legendary history described different orders of creatures, wars and battles even invented languages. Tolkien dedicated considerable time and effort to making Christmas a joyful time for his young children.
(Copyright The Tolkien Estate Ltd, 1976.) Tolkien’s first letter and illustration from Father Christmas, 1920.
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