Letter to Father Christmas

On 17 November, the refugee Carmencita Díaz sent a letter from Millau (Aveyron) to the attention of Barbara Wood, a humanitarian worker connected to the Commission for Aiiding Spanish Refugee Children in France (CAEERF). Christmas was approaching and, from her exile in France, Carmencita did not know how to send her letter to Father Christmas. “In Spain, I wrote to the Three Wise Men to ask for toys”, the little girl wrote, “and then my mommy would send the letter, but here she is sick and she also says she doesn’t know Father Christmas, so she cannot send my letter… Do you want to be my godmother, Madame Wood, and send it to him?”

Rather than asking for toys, Carmencita wrote that she needed only “strong shoes”, some “stockings” and an “overcoat” so she wouldn’t get wet when she went to school. With the letter, she included a photograph of her with her siblings. “It’s an old one, but that doesn’t matter. It is only so you know what I look like”:, she finished up. On 13 December, Renée de Monbrison, secretary general of the CAEERF sent a reply assuring her that they had communicated with Father Christmas and that they would son send a package for her and her siblings. “One learns better with warm feet, right?” 

From the start of the war, Spanish children had been the main concern of the aid agencies that worked intensively to mitigate the effects of the confict on the civilian population. When the war ended, a group of French, Spanish, and British women that included the Quaker Edith Mary Pye, the suffragist Germaine Malaterre-Sellier and the socialist Matilde Huici created the CAEERF whose goal was to provide humanitarian assistance to the children who had been forced to cross the border with their parents.

Between February 1939 and June 1940, when the German invasión of France forced the CAEERF to suspend its activities, it had performed an impressive feat of co-ordinating the humanitarian aid destined for the kore than 1,500 reception centres where Spanish women and children were interned. Some 3,000 letters in the French National Archives bear witness to this work. Letters which were written especially  y women, and above all by mothers, but also by the youngest ones who, like Carmencita Díaz, identified the organizatrion as the main interlocutor for their requests for material assistance, for help in locating lost family members, for their drawings, and school books.

AMM