Day 11 of Blogmas 2025 continues, because stopping now would be admitting defeat, and I’m nothing if not stubbornly committed to arbitrary goals. For those just discovering this December marathon, Blogmas is my annual tradition of posting holiday-themed content every single day through Christmas. This year’s posts are guided by AI-generated prompts, which is how we’ve arrived at today’s fiction challenge: A child receives a letter from the North Pole… but it’s not from Santa. Who wrote it, and why?

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The Letter from Jessica Claus

Olivia Chen was twelve years old and thoroughly done with Christmas magic. She’d figured out the Santa thing two years ago—the handwriting on “Santa’s” gift tags matched her mom’s, the cookies left out were always her dad’s favorites, and most damning of all, she’d found the Amazon order history on the family computer. She hadn’t told her younger brother Leo, who at eight still wrote elaborate letters to Santa with architectural diagrams of toy improvements. Let him have his magic a little longer.

So when the letter arrived on December 11th, addressed to “Miss Olivia Chen” with a North Pole postmark, she assumed it was her parents’ desperate attempt to rekindle her belief. The envelope was cream-colored, heavy, old-fashioned. The address was written in cursive—real cursive, not the simplified version they barely taught at school.

She opened it in her room, ready to play along for her parents’ sake, maybe pretend to be excited at dinner. But the letter inside wasn’t what she expected.

Dear Olivia,

You don’t know me, though you’ve probably heard of my husband. My name is Jessica Claus, and I need to warn you about something. I know you stopped believing in Santa two years ago (yes, we know exactly when—it’s recorded), and that’s actually why I’m able to write to you now. This letter would have burst into flames the moment you touched it if you still believed. That’s how the magic works—it protects itself from true believers.

I’m writing to you because you’re at the dangerous age. Old enough to see through the comfortable lies, young enough to still be angry about them. Old enough to recognize hypocrisy, young enough to think you’re the first one to notice. You’re at the age where you could destroy Christmas for others without understanding what you’re really destroying.

Your brother Leo still believes. Your cousins Emma and Jack still believe. The Martinez children next door still believe. I know you’ve been tempted to tell them the truth. You’ve always prided yourself on honesty, and it feels wrong to perpetuate what you see as a lie.

But before you do, I need you to understand something about the real North Pole operation.

My husband—Nicholas, though you know him as Santa—hasn’t actually delivered presents in nearly fifty years. He had what your world would call a nervous breakdown in 1974. The weight of every child’s dreams, the impossible logistics, the centuries of forced cheerfulness—it broke him. He sits in his workshop now, building toys that no child has asked for since the 1800s. Wooden horses. Tin soldiers. Hoops and sticks. He builds them perfectly, obsessively, and I tell him how wonderful they are. Then, while he sleeps, I have them quietly dismantled and the materials returned to his workshop for him to use again the next day.

The actual Christmas operation—the gifts, the visits, the magic—is run by an elaborate network of parents, retail workers, postal employees, and yes, Amazon fulfillment centers. We call it the Conspiracy of Joy. Every adult who perpetuates the Santa myth is part of it, whether they know it or not.

You’re probably wondering why. Why maintain this elaborate fiction? Why let my husband believe he’s still Santa when he hasn’t been functional in decades? Why continue the whole charade?

Because the magic isn’t in the North Pole, Olivia. It never was. The magic is in the conspiracy itself—millions of adults choosing to create wonder for children, even when their own wonder is long dead. Parents staying up until 3 AM assembling bikes, eating cookies they don’t want, writing notes in handwriting they’ve practiced to look different from their own. Exhausted retail workers who nevertheless ask children what Santa’s bringing them. Teachers who incorporate Santa into lesson plans they know are fiction. A whole world of disillusioned adults agreeing to maintain an illusion.

This is what you’re at the age to destroy. Not Santa—Santa is already gone. You’d be destroying the beautiful lie that allows parents to see their children experience pure joy. The conspiracy that lets adults remember what it felt like to believe in magic.

Your mother cried after you stopped believing. Not because you’d learned the truth, but because she could no longer give you that specific kind of happiness. She’d lost the ability to create magic for you. Your father spent three hours last Christmas trying to find a gift that would make you as happy as you were when you were seven and got that chemistry set from “Santa.” He failed. He knows he failed. He’ll keep trying and failing for the rest of his life.

Your brother Leo will stop believing next year. Statistical certainty—we track these things. His friend David will tell him at school. Leo will come home and ask your parents point-blank if Santa is real, and they’ll tell him the truth because he’ll be ready to hear it. But for this one last Christmas, he gets to believe. Your parents get to give him that magic one more time.

Here’s what I’m asking of you, Olivia: Let them have this. Let Leo have his last magical Christmas. Let your parents have their last chance to create that pure, uncomplicated joy for one of their children. Let the Martinez children next door believe as long as they can. Not because the lie is good, but because the conspiracy is beautiful.

You’re angry that adults lied to you. I understand. You feel manipulated, patronized, treated like you were too stupid to handle truth. But consider this—they didn’t lie because they thought you were stupid. They lied because they remembered being seven and believing, and they wanted to give you that feeling as long as possible. They lied because the truth is that the world is hard and magic isn’t real and sometimes people you love will die and leave you and most dreams don’t come true. They lied to give you a few years where none of that was true yet.

There’s something else, Olivia. Something I haven’t told anyone in the organization. Nicholas is starting to remember. Yesterday, he asked me why the workshop seems so empty. This morning, he wondered why the reindeer look so old. The delusion we’ve carefully maintained for fifty years is cracking. When it breaks completely, when he fully understands what he’s become and what’s been lost, I don’t know what will happen.

Maybe that’s why I’m really writing to you. Because soon there might not even be the fiction of a North Pole to write from. The whole elaborate structure might collapse, and then what? Will parents still maintain the conspiracy without even the pretense of a central authority? Will the magic dissolve completely into Amazon algorithms and targeted advertising?

I need there to be children like your brother for a little while longer. Children who believe. Not for their sake, but for ours. For the adults who need to believe that we can still create wonder, even if we can’t feel it ourselves anymore.

Don’t tell Leo, Olivia. Don’t tell any of them. Let them figure it out when they’re ready, when they’re your age and angry and disillusioned. Then maybe I’ll write to them too, explaining why their sister or neighbor or friend let them believe a lie a little longer.

Or maybe by then, the North Pole will be closed, Nicholas will be in whatever facility houses broken myths, and I’ll be just another old woman in a world that’s forgotten how to pretend magic exists.

Either way, you have a choice to make this Christmas. You can be the one who tells the truth, or you can join the Conspiracy of Joy. There’s no wrong answer, but understand that once you break the spell for someone, you can never give it back. You can’t un-tell the truth.

Choose wisely.

Regards, Jessica Claus
Acting Administrator, North Pole Operations
Keeper of Necessary Fictions

Olivia read the letter three times. It had to be a prank, but it was too elaborate, too sad, too specific. The part about her parents trying to find gifts that would recreate her seven-year-old joy—that rang too true. She’d seen the Amazon boxes, the trying-too-hard presents that missed the mark.

She went to the window and looked out at the Martinez house next door. Through their kitchen window, she could see the twins, Lucy and Luis, decorating cookies. They were Leo’s age, still believers. She could walk over there right now and end it for them. Tell them about Amazon order histories and handwriting analysis and the economic impossibility of global gift delivery.

From downstairs, she heard Leo excitedly telling their mom about modifications he wanted to make to his Santa letter. “I forgot to mention that the robot should be waterproof!” he was saying. “Do you think it’s too late to add that?”

“I’m sure Santa will understand,” their mother replied, and Olivia could hear the smile in her voice. The conspiracy in action.

She folded the letter carefully and put it in her desk drawer, under her journal and old birthday cards. Then she went downstairs.

“Leo,” she said, “you should definitely add the waterproof thing. But maybe also draw a diagram? Santa’s elves are probably more visual learners.”

Leo lit up. “That’s brilliant! Olivia, you’re the best!”

Their mother looked at Olivia with surprise and something else—gratitude? Understanding? Maybe just hope.

“Yeah,” Olivia said, meeting her mother’s eyes. “Just trying to help Santa out. I bet he’s pretty busy this time of year.”

Later that night, Olivia helped Leo with his diagram. She suggested improvements, asked questions about the robot’s functionality, participated in the fiction. It felt different than lying. It felt like being part of something bigger than truth or falsehood.

Before bed, she looked at the North Pole letter one more time. At the bottom, in tiny print she hadn’t noticed before, was a PS:

P.S. – The chemistry set when you were seven? Your father drove to six different stores to find it. It was sold out everywhere. He finally found one at a small shop an hour away, the last one they had. He paid three times retail price and never told anyone. That’s what Santa really is, Olivia—desperate parents doing impossible things to create joy. Remember that.

Olivia put the letter away and went to bed. Outside, snow began to fall, covering the world in a blanket of beautiful lies that would melt by morning but were perfect while they lasted.

Downstairs, her parents wrapped presents, ate cookies, and perpetuated the conspiracy for one more year.

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Have you ever received a letter or message that changed how you saw something you thought you understood? When did you stop believing in Santa, and do you remember who told you or how you figured it out? More importantly—if you have kids or young relatives, are you part of the Conspiracy of Joy? Drop a comment below and share your stories of maintaining (or breaking) the Christmas magic.