12/27/2025
Every year, from 1920 to 1943, the Tolkien children received letters from Father Christmas himself.
Inside, the handwriting was shaky and uneven—a detail Father Christmas often explained by citing his elderly hands and the biting Arctic chill that made it difficult to grip a pen.
In these letters, Tolkien did far more than offer standard holiday greetings. He constructed an entire parallel universe for his four children—John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla. The undisputed star of these Arctic chronicles was the North Polar Bear, a well-meaning but clumsy assistant whose mishaps were legendary.
In one particularly memorable passage, Father Christmas recounts:
“The North Polar Bear has been more bumbling than usual this year. He slipped right on the very tip of the North Pole and sent all the presents tumbling down the cliffside! We had to dispatch the Red Elves to retrieve them before they were completely buried by the snow.”
Tolkien’s attention to detail was exhaustive. He sketched maps, illustrated battles against goblins dwelling in the caves beneath Father Christmas’s home, and used his professional expertise to invent distinct languages for the inhabitants of the North Pole.
He developed an Arctic Elf Language, which shared linguistic roots with the early versions of Quenya (High Elvish). For instance, he introduced his children to the Ilbereth, the secretary of Father Christmas, whose name and speech patterns echoed the high-fantasy Elves he was simultaneously developing for Middle-earth.
Furthermore, he created an Arctic Alphabet based on the North Polar Bear’s jagged “clumsy” claw marks. These runes—often appearing as a series of scratches that looked like animal tracks—formed a phonetic script that the children had to translate. In one letter, the Polar Bear even attempts to write his own name, “Karhu,” using these thick, runic strokes.
These scripts weren’t just decorative; they were functional puzzles that the children had to decode, turning each letter into a philological adventure.
As the children grew older—by the time of the final letters in 1943, Michael and Christopher were already serving in the military—the tone shifted, becoming more profound and tinged with melancholy. It marked the transition from childhood to maturity.
In one of the final letters addressed to Priscilla, his youngest, he wrote:
“I hope you will still hang up your stockings, for I shall continue to come as long as there is someone left who believes in me.”
The legacy of these letters offers a moving lesson. We often assume that the genius of a great author belongs solely to the public or to history. Tolkien proves otherwise: the purest form of creativity is often “private”—the kind we use to spark magic in the lives of those we love.
There were no editors to polish these drafts, nor critics to judge them. There was only a father who, after a long day of philological research at Oxford, sat by candlelight to invent a reason for his children to smile.
In every shaky line and hand-drawn map, we find the quiet devotion of a father who understood that the greatest gift he could give his children was a world where magic was still possible.
This is the true spirit of Tolkien’s Christmas: the ability to transform everyday reality into an extraordinary adventure, reminding us that a simple sheet of paper can hold an entire world of wonder.
>We Are Human Angels<
Authors
Awakening the Human Spirit
We are the authors of 'We Are Human Angels,' the book that has spread a new vision of the human experience and has been spontaneously translated into 14 languages by readers.
We hope our writing sparks something in you!
