How it started…
It was December, 1967. I was 10 years old looking though The Huron Daily Plainsmen for the funny pages. (If you don’t know what funny pages are, ask your grandparents). I saw the title “Santa and the Pigwidgen”. I had no idea what a Pigwidgen was, so I read the story. What I found was the first chapter of a Christmas story about Santa Claus. But it didn’t tell me what a Pigwidgen was. I didn’t learn that until the second chapter (sorry, spoiler alert), published the next day. I was 2 chapters in and couldn’t wait for the next chapter. It was a story about how Santa became Santa Claus. The elves, the flying reindeer, the North Pole, it was all there. I saved all 17 chapters into a red spiral bound notebook. Remember, this was 1967, there weren’t that many Christmas TV specials and movies about Santa. This was my first introduction to a Santa Claus origin story.
The next year, the story was “Santa and the Hippies”. Hippies? Oh I have to read this one. Again, all 17 chapters were glued into the red notebook. After that, it was “Santa and the Dumbbell” that was saved. Then the stories stopped. For several years, at Christmas time, I would check the paper for a new story, but none ever appeared.
Let’s time warp to 2013. Going through a box of childhood treasures, I found the red notebook. After re-reading the three stories, I had the same questions that I had in 1969. What’s the story behind these stories? Why did they stop? Fortunately, we now have the internet and I had the name of the author, Lucrece Beale.
I discovered that there were 25 more stories by the author, Lu Beale, that I hadn’t read and I wanted to read them. My first thought was these stories must have been published in some book form. They had not, with the exception of three stories. From 2000 – 2002, Nostalgia Trims published “The Plot against Santa”, “Santa and the Music Box” and “Santa and the White Bunny”. One story was published each year. I was able to get copies of ”Plot” and “White Bunny” from Ebay. When they arrived, there was a bonus! Both had been autographed by Lu Beale. Both books talked about releasing another story every year, but never made it past those three.
It was now my quest to read the rest of the stories. They were published in the newspaper, so I started going through microfiche copies of old newspapers, grabbing screen prints of the chapters and stories. For the older editions, there would be pages or even days missing. It would require checking multiple newspapers for all the chapters to a single story. They weren’t always microfiched clearly, so some were hard to read.
That’s when I decided to create a readable version of the stories. I started typing the stories out. When a part was illegible, I searched for other newspaper copies of the story. About halfway through the process I got the idea to put them out on the Internet. I thought, there have to be others who want to read these. It took about 2 years to collect and transcribe the stories. This website is the result of that work.
In 2022, I found information that allowed me to reach out to Lu Beale’s two children; Mary and David. They were unaware of my website and delighted that that their mother’s stories were being made available. So I can now say, proudly, that the stories are reprinted with the permission of the Beale Family!