A palate cleanser

(And yeah, I know a lot of that is my perfectionism about wanting to give "just the right gift" and to do it at the right time, and I'm the one it mostly matters to. The back-up gift (My mom doesn't read this, so I'm safe) is a nice birdfeeder for black-oil sunflower seed so I think I'm going to see, while I'm up there, if I can run out to the farm store and get a bag of sunflower seed to go with it. Oh, she already has the seed on hand but the feeder was a smaller and cheaper gift than the "original" gift - which will now, I suppose, become a Mother's Day gift, sigh.)

Anyway, here's a really sweet story as a palate-cleanser:

Builders find an old letter to "Father Christmas," decide to play Father Christmas themselves.

Yeah, they found a seventy-odd-year-old letter in a chimney (I guess the tradition was putting the letters up the chimney) and managed to FIND the man who wrote it (and he is still alive) - and they bought some of the things he asked for - a drum, and soldiers and "Indians" and slippers and a box of chalks.

And the builders wrapped the things up and gave them to the man! I find that kind of thing touching and incredibly sweet - a chance to recapture a bit of a long-ago childhood.

(I am pretty sure my dad still has some of my Santa letters; he once asked me to get him a pair of socks and I think I saw them in his sock drawer*)

I'm shy of asking, but I admit I'd kind of like to read them, to see what I asked for all those years ago. (And I admit, selfishly - I kind of wish someone would do something like that for me, where they tracked down stuff I had really wanted as a child and gave it to me now. I suppose my buying of Little Ponies and Popples now is kind of a version of that, except I am doing it for myself.)

(*to any kiddos reading this: I think Santa gives the letters back to the parents as a keepsake after Christmas :) )

It's also kind of touching what the man asked for - very simple things - but then, it would have been the very end of WWII, and there would have been years of privation and rationing, and a box of chalks might have been a really big deal. (And anyway: even when I was a kid, I asked for simpler things than kids today ask for.)