LaConte: The passion of the postman
The Denver Center for the Performing Arts puts on a wonderful performance of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” every year, and is now celebrating its 30th year of doing so.
Denver Center for the Performing Arts uses Richard Hellesen’s 1987 stage adaptation, which sticks to the original story while extending and enhancing some parts. One of my favorite moments that improves upon the original story occurs when the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Ebenezer Scrooge to visit the home of Scrooge’s employee Bob Cratchit, and they hear Cratchit deliver a dinnertime toast to Scrooge’s health.
Instead of the short toast to Scrooge from Dickens’ story, Hellesen gives us a wonderful speech from Cratchit to his family. In the Denver Center for the Performing Arts performance, Geoffrey Kent’s Bob Cratchit has the perfect mix of casual delivery and deliberate pause as he searches for words and finds the exact language needed for the moment.
The speech is masterful and stirring, starting with Cratchit pointing out that Christmas is not a static event.
“When I listen to you talk about your hopes, I can’t but think about how Christmas changes as we grow older,” he says.
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Cratchit was talking about his own experience with Christmas, but I often think about that line with how the holiday changes each year for society as a whole. One marker of modernization is mail delivery, that under-appreciated yet absolutely crucial part of Christmas for so many families hoping to have presents delivered to loved ones across the country.
The first people to make skis and use them regularly in the West were mail carriers. Among the best-known was Norway native John Tostensen, better known as Snowshoe Thompson, who braved avalanches, bears and blizzards to deliver the mail over the Sierra Nevada mountain range between California and Nevada in the 1860s. Today, a monument exists in his honor in Soda Springs, California, with an inscription describing him as “probably the first skier of the West.”
Snowshoe Thompson’s counterpart in Colorado was Snowshoe Johnson, a man who used homemade skis to deliver mail from Crystal to Crested Butte in the 1880s. In a description of an exhibit that once adorned the Colorado Snowsports Museum in Vail, Al Johnson was said to have “learned to ski fast by outrunning avalanches.”
In the decades to come, technological improvements would make the job much safer and easier. The Rocky Mountain News, in December of 1926, ran a story with the headline “Air Mail is newest recruit among aids of Santa Claus,” describing how the Christmas rush had ushered in a new era of night flight, in which lights would be used to illuminate runways to allow for more packages to be delivered out of Denver to meet holiday demands.
By the 1930s, skis had gone from being homemade tools built for utility to mass-produced gadgets crafted for recreation, and that fact was reflected in the letters to Santa published in area newspapers. 撸先生s, bindings and boots began popping up in those letters by the mid-to-late 1930s (along with, somewhat disturbingly, machine guns), before disappearing altogether decades later as skis became everyday items given to children automatically as a way of life each winter, like a jacket or a pair of shoes. (Thankfully, machine guns have also disappeared from local kids’ Christmas lists.)
From the Steamboat Pilot:
Dec. 13, 1935, from Jay Outsen: “Dear Santa 鈥� Please bring me a pair of skis and bindings and please bring me a machine gun that shoots sparks and my sister would like you to bring her a sewing machine and a piano.”
Dec. 15, 1938, from Ralph Yates: “Dear Santa 鈥� I would like a pair of skis and a pair of ice skates and a machine gun and a train and a tool set.”
Dec. 14, 1939, from Maynard Smith: “Dear Santa 鈥� I want a pair of skis and a machine gun. Don’t try to come down my chimney or you will land in the basement.”
Dec. 12, 1940, from Ted Kolb: “Dear Santa 鈥� I want a cowboy set. I want a machine gun. I want some skis.”
In thinking about those letters to Santa, the post office and mail carriers, and all the other details where I find meaning in Cratchit’s speech about the way Christmas changes, an old joke comes to mind. I will attempt to retell it here, adapting it to our area and enhancing it slightly like Hellesen did with “A Christmas Carol.”
In addition to the newspaper editor receiving many of the letters to Santa each Christmas, the other person who gets piles of them is your local postman. Oftentimes, in the back offices and break rooms of mail carriers’ workplaces, those letters would be opened and read aloud for the entertainment and enjoyment of the workers, as there’s no real place to deliver a letter addressed to the “North Pole.”
As I mentioned earlier, skis and boots and bindings in mountain towns went from a common request 85 years ago to being almost nonexistent in letters to Santa in recent decades as skis started becoming regarded as parental responsibility rather than a special gift.
But one year, not long ago, the post office workers here received a letter from a local third grader with beautiful handwriting who said she would love to learn how to ski. Her dad might even be able to get her a ski pass through his work, she said, but there’s no way her parents would ever be able to afford skis and bindings and boots.
“If I could just get those three items, Santa 鈥� skis, bindings and boots 鈥� then I could join my friends on the mountain, where they seem to have so much fun every weekend,” she said.
The post office workers, all skiers themselves, felt terrible. No child who wants to learn to ski should be held back by a lack of equipment, they said. So they passed a collection cup around among themselves, seeing if they could raise enough money to buy her the equipment she needed. Some donated $50, some $100, and at the end of the day, they had raised enough to get her a nice pair of skis with bindings in a size that she would be able to use for several seasons. But there wasn’t enough money left over for ski boots, and they didn’t know what size she was anyway, so they figured if they delivered the skis and bindings to the return address on the letter, someone would find a way to get the child a pair of boots so she could get on the mountain.
A week went by and another envelope addressed to the North Pole was received, a rare post-Christmas letter to Santa. The workers immediately recognized the beautiful handwriting and opened it to see what the girl had to say.
“Dear Santa 鈥� thank you so much for the skis and bindings,” the letter said. “I know you got me a pair of ski boots also, but the stupid idiots at the post office must have lost them.”
John LaConte is a reporter at the Vail Daily who authors the weekly Time Machine feature that runs on Mondays. Email him at jlaconte@vaildaily.com
