More on the Christmas stories from the Beale family
A letter from the Beale family
Ron, we are extremely grateful to you for making the Christmas stories available to interested readers everywhere. Our mother would have been overjoyed. You worked tirelessly to track down each story, eventually assembling all 28 stories on one site. It’s a towering achievement. Your generosity embodies the Christmas spirit.
We’d like to provide some information particularly regarding the Christmas stories to share with readers:
Our mother Lucrece (Lu) Beale was a remarkable person. She was born in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1914. She had three brothers. Writing was a calling from an early age and remained so throughout her life. She became an avid reader. She attended Wellesley College on a scholarship. She majored in English. After graduating in 1937, she was given a job at The Boston Sunday Post as a feature writer. Three years later she began working for the Associated Press (AP) in New York. When asked in 1942 if she would assume writing an annual Christmas story which had been started in 1932 by AP reporter Sigrid Arne, she happily agreed. This would mark the beginning of a 28-year commitment.
In 1941 she was transferred to the AP Washington DC office where she met our father William (Bill) Beale. They married within the year. In 1942 they had a son (David Beale). Three years later in 1945, they had a daughter (Mary Beale). Our mother kept her position with the AP as a feature writer on special assignment. Our father became chief of the AP Washington bureau in 1948, serving until his retirement in 1969.
Each year, shortly after Christmas, our mother would open her manual typewriter and begin writing the next year’s Christmas story. When the story was completed, usually within weeks, there was a collective sigh of relief. While each year’s story was breathtakingly original, they shared a common format. The stories unfolded in a sequence of chapters. Most stories had 17 chapters but the range was 15 to 20. The stories shared a common theme. Christmas itself was at risk due to a variety of nefarious forces. Each new story would be submitted to the AP in New York. Ultimately it would be sent to participating newspapers throughout the country. In Washington DC the story would appear in The Evening Star, a chapter a night, culminating on December 24th, Christmas Eve.
During the years in which the stories were written, our mother received some wonderful fan mail. Parents, children, teachers, and newspaper editors took the time to write to her when especially moved by a story. At the time, letters and newspapers were the main sources of communication. Neither copier machines nor personal computers were a presence in people’s homes. She stored the letters in a box that she kept in the attic. We have continued to preserve them. Collectively they provide a glimpse of the far-reaching influence that the stories had. Some readers wrote simply in search of a missing chapter or story. A woman in Bowling Green, Kentucky, writing in 1957, asked where she could purchase a copy of “Santa and the Secret Room” for her nephew. “You have written the most fascinating story,” she said. A mother in Jasonville, Indiana wrote in 1968 of missing three chapters of “Santa and the Pigwidgen”. “It was such a delightful story. …your story put the Christmas spirit in our children.” A mother in Millbrae, California was missing all of “Santa and the Flying Shoe” and one chapter of “Santa and the Giant Fighter”. She, like many other parents, was hoping to make the stories into books. In 2008 a reader from Longview, Texas had bound copies made of “Santa and the Dumdiddy”. She gave one to both Dave and me. We have treasured them. Of the stories in general she wrote “I cannot count the hours that I have spent listening to or reading this family treasure that your mom gave to our family and so many others.” In each instance our mother was able to replace the missing stories or chapters with the few extra copies that she had received. To date the stories have not been published independently.
Some readers wrote letters to the papers that carried the Christmas stories. At the time there was a mutual dependence between the papers and their subscribers which is true today as well. The success of the Christmas stories rested in part on newspapers having a wide audience. In 1949, a mother wrote to the editor of The Evening Star thanking the paper for running the “delightful story” of “Santa and the Magician“. A 10-year-old child living in Kingston, Idaho wrote to the Spokane Daily Chronicle in 1953: “I am one of the many children who read ‘Santa and the Flying Pup’. I enjoyed it very much.” Another reader of “Santa and the Flying Pup” who lived in Portland, Texas wrote to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times in 1954 to report that she had enjoyed the story, noting “Someone read it to me every night“.
It’s said that one journalist complimenting another is the highest form of praise. In 1961 a reporter at the Monitor-Index in Moberly, Missouri wrote to the AP in New York to see if there were copies of the Christmas story available from before 1953. “We do a lot of reading in our house,” he wrote, “and my wife and children think Beale is great.”
Occasionally the balance between newspapers and readers is disturbed by external events. This is what occurred in 1961 when 3rd grade students at Ricardo School in Kingsville, Texas realized that Christmas break would begin before the teacher finished reading “Santa and the Flying Shoe” to the class. The students decided to take matters into their own hands. They wrote to the editor of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. They requested that the paper include two extra chapters in its next edition so that they would get to read the whole story before school got out. The paper sent over the last two chapters straight away. The editor informed our mother of what had transpired, asking her to send a note to the class which she did.
Newspapers frequently go the extra mile for their readers. In 1963 The Saginaw News in Saginaw, Michigan was asked by a California resident to track down a Christmas story that her fiancé remembered from grade school. Although now a distinguished member of the Air Force, her fiancé had experienced poverty growing up. Listening to the Christmas stories had been one of the experiences that gave him hope and motivation towards a better future. There was one story that he didn’t hear the end of. It was about a princess who had to have a three-foot smile by Christmas, or she would die. The staff at the paper reviewed its files but could not find the story she described. Fortunately, the staff was able to locate the teacher, since retired, who had been involved. The teacher remembered the student and the story – “Santa and the Music Box”. It was a three-inch smile, not a three-footer, she recalled. Sadly, she was missing the last three installments, most likely related to the beginning of Christmas vacation. Our mother was contacted by the staff. She sent her only copy to the bride-to-be. She received a lovely thank-you note in return and eventually the copy as well.
(Spoiler alert: The Christmas stories always have a happy ending.)
The full potential of the Christmas stories was perhaps best realized by Public School Three on Hamilton Avenue in Yonkers, New York. Writing to our mother in 1947, the editor of The Herald Statesman proudly described how the teachers at School Three were incorporating the Christmas stories into their lesson plans. The students used details from the stories to paint murals, make scrapbooks, write stories, create dictionaries, compose songs, and construct physical replicas of the make-believe locations. Inwardly the children experienced the joy of reading and being read to. The editor described receiving “many hundreds of letters from children relating their happiness”.
The Christmas stories leave an indelible impression on many readers. In 2005, Dave was reading An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland, by Michael Dirda when he came across a reference to the Christmas stories. Currently Michael Dirda is a book critic for The Washington Post. He is a former Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism (1993). He grew up in a blue-collar Ohio community. In his memoir he recalls a Christmas season when the local paper carried a serial about Santa. He described it as a suspenseful cliffhanger, noting that he didn’t miss a one. He also remembered feeling almost sad when December 24th arrived, and the story ended.
Reading the stories again now, we’re swept away by the beauty of our mother’s imagination. A few lines into a story and one realizes they are in the hands of a master storyteller. One knows deep down that the situations are only make believe but there are all these dilemmas to be solved. The originality of the characters is matched only by the cleverness of the solutions they come up with, seemingly out of thin air. In real life our mother had a matter of fact, common sense approach to life and a gentle sense of humor. Friends and family sought her counsel.
In addition to writing, our mother enjoyed nature and exercise. She loved hiking particularly with the family dog by her side. She had an awesome tennis game and coached girls’ tennis for 25 years at a local high school. She took up skiing when she turned 50. In 1965 she wrote a three-part series for The Washington Post about a learn-to-ski week that she had had in Canada. When she was still skiing twenty-five years later, she wrote a follow up piece for The Post with the mantra “You’re never old enough to quit skiing”. She joined a local ski club that met year-round. In 1979 she became editor of its newsletter, a position she held until 1994. She also served a term as its president. She was naturally interested in other people’s adventures.
Her vision gradually diminished due to macular degeneration as she approached her eighties. Undaunted she continued to read and write with the aid of magnification and screen reading software for the computer. She received books on tape in the mail from the DC Library for the Blind loan program. A few weeks before she died, she began listening to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. She passed away from lymphoma on October 6, 2004 at age 90. The subsequent church service was a celebration of her life. As we had requested, the organist played “The Saints” with gusto during the closing procession.
Respectfully,
Mary Beale
(Lu’s daughter) and
Dave Beale
(Lu’s son)
March 1, 2024
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