What was the name of the Christmas character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s illustrated family letters?

Father Christmas was the character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s illustrated family letters.

From 1920 until 1942, Tolkien wrote annual letters to his children in the imagined voice of Father Christmas. The letters were supposedly sent from the North Pole and were accompanied by drawings, handwriting, stamps, and invented accounts of events there.

The stories included Father Christmas’s clumsy assistant, the North Polar Bear, as well as battles, mishaps, goblins, and other inhabitants of the polar world. Tolkien used different handwriting styles and visual details to make the letters appear authentic to his children.

The letters were a private family tradition rather than part of Middle-earth. They were collected and published posthumously as Letters from Father Christmas in 1976. The work is sometimes confused with Tolkien’s major fantasy books, but its setting is a playful version of the modern Christmas tradition, not the mythology of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.