Dear Santa,

We messed up.

Yeah, I know it’s not the first time and it probably won’t be the last, either. But this time, we messed up real good. You see, last Friday we ran our special Letters to Santa issue. As you know, we run it every year a few days before Christmas to give you plenty of time to get the boys’ and girls’ lists in order. Your job is hard enough as it is, so we do whatever we can to make it a little easier on you. We also run it early so that parents have time to see if their child’s letter is in the paper. That way, if we mess up and leave any letters out (which happens sometimes), there’s still time to print the ones we missed before Christmas.

But here’s the problem.

This year Christmas is on a Wednesday, which is also the day we would have run the letters that we missed on Friday. And if we waited to publish them on Wednesday, you wouldn’t have gotten a list from Neva, John, Cadence, Livia or D.J. before heading out on Christmas Eve. It wouldn’t be fair to them for you not to get their letters on account of our mistakes, so here’s what we decided to do. Rather that have a Wednesday paper this week, we decided to go ahead and put it out on Tuesday so you can get these five last letters in time. It will still say Wednesday on it, but we wanted to give you a heads up so you weren’t confused when it showed up on Tuesday.

And as it turns out, the other good thing about publishing the newspaper on Tuesday this week is that none of our employees at The Tidewater News will have to work late on Christmas Eve or deliver newspapers on Christmas Day. Heck, it works out so well I think we may just do it again next week for New Year’s Eve.

So anyway Santa, if you could go ahead and make sure to check out the five letters we left out last Friday, they should be on page six. The kids got them in to us on time but we messed it up, so if you could pay them some extra special attention we’d really appreciate it. Sorry again if we caused you any trouble, but we hope this one last letter to clear it all up. Merry Christmas.

Love,
The Tidewater News, 108 years old
Franklin

TONY CLARK is the associate publisher of The Tidewater News. He can be reached at tony.clark@tidewaternews.com.