Inside the world of real-life elves who make kids’ holiday wishes come true

In 1912, Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock made an executive decision that would drastically expand the mission of the U.S. Postal Service: He began forwarding mail to Santa Claus. For years, children’s letters to Santa were treated as junk mail, and routinely routed to the dead letter office. Under Hitchcock’s purview, this all changed. The wishes of American children would now not only be read, they’d also be answered. And so, “Operation Santa Claus” was born.

By the end of WWII, mail rooms were overrun with these letters. Remember that famous scene in Miracle on 34th Street where the clever lawyer attempts to prove Santa’s existence by having mailmen stream into the courtroom with bag after bag of letters addressed to the North Pole? That’s just a fraction of the volume of mail generated by Operation Santa. USPS workers, and a brigade of conscripted citizen volunteers, review these letters annually, and even set about fulfilling the needs of some of the neediest children.

Producer Brendan Gaul finds Operation Santa endlessly fascinating. A Bucks County native, Gaul has worked alongside the Postal Service for years, in a more traditional marketing capacity. A few years ago, he was approached by documentarian Dana Nachman to help make a feature documentary about the program. The result was 2020′s Dear Santa, which explored the history of Operation Santa and the workers who helped gin up a little magic every holiday season.

Now, Gaul is expanding the Dear Santa brand. Dear Santa, The Series, available on Hulu and Localish, casts the net a little wider. “There were a lot of stories that didn’t make it into the [original] film,” Gaul says. “Every year there’s going to be a Christmas, which means there’s going to be a whole new batch of letters.”

Each of the series’ six episodes zooms in on a child’s particular Christmas wish and follows the chain of postal employees and local volunteers (called “elves”) who conspire to make it come true. The wishes themselves range from the fairly standard — like a new bike — to more fantastic appeals (one little girl dreams of discovering a dinosaur). In a show of genuinely heart-tingling generosity, another child requests that an “elf” come over and clean the house, to ease the burden of her overworked mom. It’s a simple, affecting, well-made docuseries that benefits greatly from the increased tolerance for sweetness and schmaltz that comes with the holidays. The two final episodes of the series will air Christmas Eve at 1 and 1:30 p.m. EST.

The series really comes alive when it digs into the lives of the letter-writers. “That’s the light up moment,” says Gaul. “Seeing where that person lives, who they are, and what it really means to them. There’s nothing like wish fulfillment.” Dear Santa draws stories from across the country including the Chester County home of one of Santa’s “lead elves” — an irrepressible postal worker named Donna, and dino-obsessed Maddie who, in lieu of getting a real-life prehistoric reptile, is granted a tour of a paleontologist’s dig site.

Part of the series’ big-tent appeal comes from the way it manages to sustain that wish-fulfilling holiday season magic. Without spoiling anything (including some of the season’s best-kept secrets), the doc series fully commits to its basic premise: that a broad group of public employees, and business owners at the community-level, are enlisted annually as Santa’s elves, working to make kids’ wishes come true. “For the people delivering the gifts and for the postal workers who are delivering those gifts, they believe in their hearts that they are doing the work of Santa,” says Gaul.

“Being able to meet those everyday people, people that keep the world running, and mean so much, to us, is important.”

“Dear Santa, The Series” is available to stream on ABC Localish and Hulu.