Rosie from Atlanta, Georgia
Dear Santa,
My name is Rosie and I am six years old. I live in Atlanta, Georgia. I want two things for Christmas.
I want peaches.
And I want a bear.
Thank you.
Rosie Anne Beaumont
Atlanta, Georgia
Dear Rosie,
In several centuries of reading Christmas letters, I have never received one as perfectly constructed as yours. Two sentences. Two wishes. A name. A thank you. Done. The elves in the correspondence division have asked me to pass along their professional admiration. Gerald, who once used four hundred words to explain why he needed a systems update that took four minutes to perform, has been encouraged to study your letter as a model of communication. He is still thinking about it.
The peaches.
Rosie, you live in Georgia, which is called the Peach State, and which grows some of the finest peaches in the world, which means you have chosen a Christmas wish that is both correct and very specifically yours. I respect this enormously. A child who knows exactly what she wants and wants something real and delicious and grown from the actual ground of her actual home state is demonstrating a quality of clarity that most adults never achieve.
Georgia peaches are a genuine wonder. The combination of the red clay soil, the long warm summers, and the particular way the Georgia sun sits in August produces a peach that is softer, sweeter, and more fragrant than peaches grown almost anywhere else. The juice, when a Georgia peach is perfectly ripe, does not stay on the fruit. It runs down your chin before you can stop it, which is either inconvenient or the entire point depending on how you feel about a peach that means business. I have been delivering to Georgia for a very long time and I have never once flown over it in peach season without Rudolph slowing down slightly over the orchards. He cannot help it. Nobody can.
The peaches are noted, confirmed, and enthusiastically approved. There will be peaches. The North Pole has arrangements with Georgia that I am not permitted to detail but which involve a level of logistical coordination that the elves consider some of their most rewarding seasonal work.
The bear.
Rosie. I need to ask you one question, and it is an important one, so please think about it carefully when you read this.
Do you want a bear bear, or a teddy bear?
I ask because both are options, though one of them is considerably more straightforward to deliver and considerably better suited to sleeping arrangements, sharing a bedroom, and accompanying a six-year-old through daily life without causing what the North Pole's logistics team refers to, in our internal documentation, as "an incident."
A real bear — a black bear of the sort found in the mountains of northern Georgia, or a grizzly bear from further west, or a polar bear, which I could source locally given my address — is an extraordinary animal. I say this with full sincerity and as someone who has spent considerable time in the company of large mammals. They are magnificent, intelligent, and among the most impressive creatures on the planet. They are also not suited to apartments, to Christmas mornings, to car journeys, to school, or to the inside of any building that also contains furniture, carpeting, or people who were not expecting a bear. The North Pole has a strict policy, dating to an incident in 1987 that I am still not fully at liberty to discuss, about the delivery of live large animals to residential addresses without extremely specific prior arrangements that your letter, while excellent in many other respects, did not include.
A teddy bear, on the other hand, is one of the finest things I deliver. A good teddy bear — well-made, properly stuffed, with a face that looks like it has opinions but is keeping them to itself — is a companion that can go everywhere a six-year-old goes, requires no feeding, does not startle the neighbours, and improves significantly with age in the way that only things genuinely loved can do. The best teddy bears I have ever delivered are the ones that are still on someone's shelf thirty years later, worn at the ears and slightly lopsided, held together by the specific gravity of being known by one person for a very long time. That is not nothing, Rosie. That is quite a lot.
I will be bringing you a teddy bear. He is large, soft, and honey-coloured, which felt right for Georgia. He does not have a name yet. That is your job. I trust you to do it well. You have already demonstrated excellent judgment in what you ask for, which suggests you will also demonstrate excellent judgment in what you call things.
Merry Christmas, Rosie. The peaches and the bear are on their way. The letter you wrote to get them is, in the opinion of the entire North Pole correspondence team, the finest letter of the season, and this is not a small season.
Your friend,
Santa Claus
The North Pole
P.S. If the bear you wanted was, in fact, a real bear, please ask a parent to write in and clarify and we will discuss the arrangements, the liability waiver, and the 1987 incident, which your parents are old enough to hear about and which I hope will be instructive.
peachesandbear.co.uk https://santaclaus.top/peaches-and-bear/
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