The Elf Service - Episode 22

Letters to Father Christmas. What is the Post Office to do with them? They can’t deliver them. They don’t know his address. They can’t return them. Who could be so cruel? Irving Jefferson has the answer and it’s brilliantly simple. But reporter Maddie Sharp is beginning to suspect that Irving Jefferson and his plan might not be as simple as they appear.

The Elf Service is a story for Christmas in 24 daily episodes, written by tobias sturt and read by Jon Millington. The theme music is Santa Claus is comin’ to town by Riley Farley and their orchestra from The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/). Our illustrations are by Jamie Lenman (http://www.jamielenman.com/portfolio/).

The Elf Service is inspired by a true story - the story of John Gluck, the Santa Claus man, a story I heard about on the sadly defunct Futility Closet podcast (https://www.futilitycloset.com/2020/09/28/podcast-episode-313-the-santa-claus-association/), and then discovered more thoroughly in Alex Palmer's biography of Gluck (https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-santa-claus-man-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-jazz-age-con-man-and-the-invention-of-christmas-in-new-york/9781493049158)

Gluck was an entrepreneur (a slightly shady one at that) in pre-WWI New York, who started a charity taking letters written to Santa Claus and finding wealthy Manhattanites to answer them with presents. And there my story starts diverging (fairly dramatically) from real life.

I've also been reading Crying the News, a history of America's news boys (https://uk.bookshop.org/books/crying-the-news-a-history-of-america-s-newsboys-9780197533338/9780197533338), which I discovered via the You're Wrong About podcast (https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/1112270/6500155)

The Christmas Stories podcast is hosted on Acast and we also have a Substack newsletter. You can find out about both at christmasstories.co.uk

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.