The Long Way to Santa's Desk

The letter was written in green crayon, on paper with one torn edge where it had come out of a notebook. It said Dear Santa at the top, with the S facing the wrong way. In the bottom corner was a drawing of a dog called Pickle. Pickle was a very good dog, but in the drawing he looked a lot like a potato with ears.

Ada folded the letter twice, very hard, and put it in an envelope. She wrote the address herself: Santa, The North Pole, The Top of the World. Then she stuck on a strawberry sticker, because it was the closest thing she had to a stamp, and her dad lifted her up to the postbox.

Clunk. The letter dropped into the dark. It was warmer in the postbox than the letter had expected, and it was not alone. There was a birthday card for somebody's granny, who could not stop talking about the balloons on its front. There was a postcard from the seaside that still smelled faintly of sun cream.

"Where are you going?" asked the postcard. "The North Pole," said the letter, a little shyly. "But my S is backwards, and Pickle looks like a potato." "Nobody minds about that up there," said the birthday card. "I've heard they like the potato ones best."

In the morning, a postman with enormous gloves emptied the box. At the sorting office, a lady with a pencil behind her ear held the letter up to the light. "North Pole," she said, and smiled. She did not put it on the big moving belt with everything else. She put it in a special tray with a gold star on the side.

That night, at the stroke of midnight, a snow goose called Marguerite landed on the sorting office roof. She took the special bag in her beak, gave one polite honk, and flew north.

The letter could hear Marguerite's wings creaking slowly in the cold. They flew over fields, and over dark sea, and over ice that glittered under the moon. The air grew colder and the stars grew closer, until they looked near enough to touch.

At the North Pole Liaison Office, the bag was opened in the Smoothing Room. It smelled of cinnamon and warm laundry. An elf with round spectacles took the letter out, looked at the two hard folds, and said, "Ah. A well-squeezed one." She laid it on a little board and ironed it, very gently, with a warm iron that went tsss. The letter had never felt so flat or so important.

Then it went into a basket, and the basket went up a winding staircase, and at the top of the staircase was a door with a brass plate that said: Desk. Behind the door was a big chair by a fire. In the big chair was Santa Claus, with his slippers on and his reading glasses on the end of his nose.

Santa unfolded the letter and read it slowly, every word, the way you read something that matters. When he got to the bottom corner, he laughed a big, warm laugh that made the fire flicker. "Pickle," he said. "What a handsome dog." He did not seem to notice the backwards S at all.

He pinned the drawing on the board above his desk, between a picture of a cat and a picture of something that was either a dragon or a cake. Then he took out his best pen and a fresh sheet of paper and began to write a reply. Dear Ada, it began.

When he had finished, the reply went into an envelope, ready for Marguerite in the morning, ready for its own long way back. And Ada's letter, with its backwards S, was filed in a drawer that smelled of cinnamon, with a thousand other letters from a thousand other children.

It was dark in the drawer, and warm, and full of soft papery breathing. The letter settled down between a letter about a bicycle and a letter about a baby brother, and for the first time since the postbox, it closed its eyes and slept.