On Christmas Eve, J.R.R. Tolkien turned family tradition into a private mythology, sending illustrated letters from Father Christmas that mixed whimsy, careful craft, and early hints of the world that became Middle-earth.
Children waiting on Santa know the hush and the thrill of something wonderful arriving in the night. For Tolkien, that feeling found a shape: hand-drawn letters, stamps from the North Pole, and miniature tales delivered to his kids each December.
He began the practice when his son John was three, and the earliest keepsakes are charmingly simple. The first North Pole stamp cost “two kisses” and was given to Tolkien’s three-year-old son, John.
One early card showed a man in a red coat labeled “Me” alongside a snowy domed building captioned “My House.” Those little touches mixed straightforward humor with the kind of visual detail Tolkien loved to invent for family amusement.
Over roughly twenty years he kept the tradition alive, writing as Father Christmas and populating those notes with a cast of characters. The letters described daily life at the Pole with a grumpy Polar Bear assistant and misadventures that felt both domestic and mythic.
They were never throwaway sketches; Tolkien treated them as stories and artworks meant to delight and endure. “They were miniature works of art and storytelling.
The drawings carried an unusual density of detail, and one observer called that attention to craft “extraordinary.” That same eye for small, precise invention later fed into the maps, languages, and objects that make up Tolkien’s epic fiction.
I had the chance to see some of the Tolkien material housed in archives, and the notes and sketches reveal a meticulous mind at work. There are handwritten plans, charts done long before spreadsheets, and character drawings that trace paths into larger imaginative projects.
He poured the same care into the Christmas letters as he did into his public books, shaping scenes and alphabets for a private audience. What Tolkien knew about Christmas was the magic of the season — something he carried over into his other writing.
The Father Christmas notes mixed familiar holiday lore with original inventions: snow elves, red elves, and even a goblin alphabet that his children could try to decode. Those playful inventions became a laboratory for the linguistic and cultural ideas that later surfaced in Middle-earth.
Language shows up early in the letters, with Elvish-like turns of phrase and influences borrowed from Finnish that hint at Quenya. The Christmas pieces were both a private amusement and a creative sketchbook, planting seeds that would grow into fully formed mythic work.
Readers and scholars have used the letters to trace how Tolkien built stories from small scenes, and how domestic narrative can feed epic scope. As Tate says, the letters showed how Tolkien’s mind worked and his creative storytelling process. It was a glimpse into the groundwork that would become ‘The Lord of the Rings.’
Reality intruded as it does: children grow up, and global events change domestic rhythms. Tolkien’s last Father Christmas letter went to his youngest daughter, Priscilla, in 1943, marking the end of that particular, intimate project.
Tolkien died September 2, 1973, at the age of 81, and a collection of those family letters later appeared in book form. All the letters were published posthumously in ‘Letters from Father Christmas’ in 1976.
The images and notes from those pages reveal a writer who loved story mechanics as much as charm, and who valued the connective tissue of family ritual. The drawings show a mind that understood not only the magic of Christmas, but the magic of storytelling and world-building, and all the things fan love and cherish Tolkien for to this day.
“At its hart, this tradition wasn’t about fantasy — it was about connection,” Tate wrote. That line captures how the letters functioned: private gifts made public over time by readers hungry for any new glimpse into Tolkien’s craft.
Those Father Christmas letters now sit alongside maps and manuscripts as part of Tolkien’s creative legacy, a reminder that great world-building often starts in the smallest of domestic gestures. If you read them, you see a father inventing wonders not to astonish the world but to keep his children laughing, puzzling, and believing for another year.
