Some of these were published in the Mesabi Daily News in Virginia Minnesota where my grandmother lived, my family had moved to eastern Wisconsin. Starting in 1950 my grandmother clipped out the stories and mailed them to us daily. What a treat for a young boy! This continued for a number of years and has formed a part of my Christmas memories which I have shared with my family. Recently I found a few years worth of these clippings stuffed in some old envelopes. they were in very bad condition with lots of old scotch tape holding parts together. I have wanted to pass them on to my grand children and now I can share all the stories in a form they can read as well as preserving the originals that I have.

Thank You and Merry Christmas to All and especially to you.

I’ve been looking for the “Santa and the Pigwidgen” story for years! My daughter is four and is the perfect age to hear the “real” way Santa became Santa.

My mom read us this story every Christmas.

THANK YOU!!!

I would like to say thank you very much for making the stories available to read on the net!  (I had not seen the ones before “Santa and the Haunted House”, which is the first story I came in at with the newspapers.)

I have been searching the internet for MY local archived newspaper copy of Santa & the Z Bus, but to no avail, until last evening, when I somehow stumbled onto the link to the actual story.  I, too, was very young when the chapters ran daily in my local paper and I remember thinking about getting home just to read the new chapter!  I believe I was was 6 or 7 years old.  Over the years, I lost my scrapbook and have never been able to even explain to anyone except my mother, who cut them out for me, what the story was.  No one had ever heard of it.  I just want to Thank You so much for sharing this bit of history from MY PAST.  Thank you and I look forward to reading all of her other books online. Please don’t take them down, at least until I can save them to my tablet.

Back in the mid 70s our local paper printed this story in the News Journal. I taught in a country school and few students got the paper. I read each chapter every day and after Christmas I finished the story. They loved it. For the next 20+ years I read the story to my middle school students and everyone loved it. I had no idea the history behind the story. My daughter just sent me this link. I am thrilled to be able to read all of these stories. Thank you so much for sharing. I plan to read them to my grandchildren when they are older and tell them the history of their being written.

I have been having fun re-reading the Lucrece Beale Santa stories that my mom and dad read to my sister and me in the late 1950’s. Thank you so much for your effort in finding them, and the artwork I remember very well, and posting them for readers of a certain age who remember them as part of the Christmas-season fun from many years ago! Thank you, again!

Best Wishes and Merry Christmas!

I did the same thing you did. I saw “Santa and the Pigwidgen” in the paper and cut out each issue and saved them in a special notebook. And, yes I was sad when the stories stopped several years later. Many years ago I found microfiche versions of more of the stories but they were sometimes missing parts and did not have all these that you put together.  I carried that notebook with me as I moved from state to state over the years. “Santa and the Pigwidgen” is still one of my favorite Christmas stories.

Thank you, thank you.

I’ve been searching for over 20 years for the Santa stories that, when I was a child, were in my local newspaper.  No one I talked to, even my 3 older sisters, didn’t remember.

I put it on Facebook in “you know you are from Aberdeen, South Dakota” and low and behold a Professor of History of one of the two local colleges found it as well as a young man from the local library came up with some on microfilm.

I’ve put your link in my favorites since recently getting a laptop after many years without.

I worked behind two every day till last year when I found out I have lung cancer.

This makes my heart shine like you wouldn’t believe.

Bringing a fresh new adventure in my life to look forward to reading all the stories.

Thank you again!

I just learned that there was more than one! We have been reading just one of her stories every Christmas while our kids were growing up. Our kids are grown now, and are carrying on the tradition to our grandchildren. Santa and the Dumdiddy.

In 1967, my mother read us the installments of Santa and the Pigwidgen as they came out, and put them in a binder to read every year as part of our Christmas tradition. I was searching for the story to read to my grandkids, and found your site- I never knew she wrote 27 similar series! Maybe next year we’ll try Santa And The White Bunny!

P.S. The 8 & 10 year old loved the story. The 3 year old said it freaked her out!

I discovered Lucrece Beale’s Christmas stories as a child in 1969 with her last Santa story—Santa and the Dumbbell. It was the perfect daily Christmas activity, and I anxiously awaited each new magical installment. I clipped them from the newspaper and saved them for years. I found random other bits of her stories in my grandmother’s endless stack of old newspapers, but not enough to compile a complete story. As an adult, I sought out the entire collection using a subscription to a newspaper archive site and downloaded PDFs of each year’s story. For the past five years, I’ve chosen one story each year and used my graphic design skills to collect it into a printed page for each day, and shared them with my grandchildren to read one each night leading up to Christmas. It’s been an enjoyable tradition, and they love it. Having these stories available and gathered into one website has made the process much easier than transcribing them from the original downloads. Thank you so much for your work in compiling these all together so that they can continue to be enjoyed by not only those who originally got to read them but also by new generations!