A common element of letters to Santa from the late 19th and early 20th is requests for bags of nuts for Christmas. Why is this? Was it just tradition or did children actually want nuts for Christmas over, say, candy?

The custom of sending letters to Santa is a fairly old one – one that seems to have originated in the United States and which can be dated to the early 1870s, only a decade or so after the regularisation of a national hand-delivered mail delivery service first began to create the impression of "mail as a pleasant surprise arriving at one’s door, rather than a burdensome errand," as Alex Palmer puts it.

There seems to be little evidence, prior to that decade, that the idea that children might write to St Nicholas and receive any sort of reply, whether in the form of presents or a return letter, had any sort of traction; the few pieces of Santa-related correspondence that are mentioned in print the the first half of the nineteenth century are letters purporting to have come from St Nicholas. These, it seems, were typically written by parents, and offered moral or behavioural advice. Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, a future minister, recalled that, as early as the 1820s, he received “an autograph letter from Santa Claus, full of good counsels”, while, in the 1850s, Fanny Longfellow (wife of the poet), wrote annually, in character, each Christmas to each of her children to comment on their manners and behaviour over the preceding 12 months.

Several things happened to change this state of affairs. One, which took place across the longer term, was the development of a conception of childhood as a distinct period in an individuals' life, a change which historians of this topic typically date to roughly the period c.1750-1850. Another was a change in the way in which St Nicholas himself was generally perceived; it was not until well into the latter part of the nineteenth century that a figure who had once been portrayed as a stern disciplinarian – Palmer points out that

the first image of St. Nicholas in the United States, commissioned by the New-York Historical Society in 1810, showed him in ecclesiastical garb with a switch in hand next to a crying child, while the earliest known Santa picture-book shows him leaving a birch rod in a naughty child’s stocking, which he “Directs a Parent’s hand to use / When virtue’s path his sons refuse”

– morphed into the more cuddly and more generous patron saint of children familiar to us today. But a third, much more specific, reason for the shift was a cartoon drawn by Thomas Nast, and published in the influential Harper's Weekly in 1871, which depicted St Nicholas sorting letters he had received from "Good children's parents" (still not "good children," note) and “naughty Children’s Parents”. Given that Nast is the man generally credited with popularising the idea that Santa lived at the North Pole, it's not too much of a stretch to attribute him with sufficient influence to get the fundamental shift that interests us underway pretty much single-handed.

Now, with regard to your claim that "a common element of letters to Santa from the late 19th and early 20th is requests for bags of nuts for Christmas," several collections of early missives to St Nicholas do survive, and others were occasionally gathered together and published in contemporary newspapers. These do seem to bear out the suggestion that requests for gifts of nuts were common features of the earliest letters, though certainly the samples I have reviewed feature such requests only as parts of longer lists, and as relatively minor ones at that. So, for example, "H.O.O." of Newark, Delaware, writing in 1919, requested "a doll and lots of candy, peanuts and oranges," while a girl named Mary, living in Starkville, Mississippi in 1912, requested "a bracelet, a doll's trunk, a story book and fireworks of all kinds" – the last being a very common request in these early letters – plus a "bugle and a little apron," and finally "apples, oranges, raisins, pecans, peanuts and candy". Another girl, named Gail, from Foyil, Oklahoma, ambitiously requested "a monkey, dolly, tablet and pencil, sled, automobile and horn, drum, set of dishes, red top boots, mittens [and] a little engine" in 1914, but did not neglect to mention "candy, apples and nuts."

If this small sampling of letters is at all representative, then, nuts were typically only part of a broader menu of requests, and were generally associated with other small items of food such as sweets and fruit. There are several reasons why such items were grouped together, and associated with Christmas. To begin with, and from a purely practical point of view, they were small, relatively inexpensive luxuries, and ideal for stuffing into Christmas stockings (another fairly newly-minted tradition that was spreading fast by the late nineteenth century). Oranges, in particular, were closely associated with Christmas, so much so that Phil Strong, recalling family celebrations of Christmas in Iowa around 1900, remembered "the days when an orange had just one use – to fill the toe of a Christmas stocking; three boys in our family – three oranges a year". Beginning a few years later, the Sunkist corporation had to launch whole advertising campaigns to persuade consumers to purchase the fruit at other times of the year.

The association of nuts with Christmas, though, dates back to a much earlier period than the idea of writing letters to Santa; Brunner places its origins in Europe in the Middle Ages, and it remained common there long into the eighteenth century, when Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoeven reported a Christmas eve visit to the philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose home boasted "an enormous tree, lit by countless candles, with gilded nuts, gingerbread, and all sorts of little sweeties." The reason, according to Miles – whose study of Christmas traditions dates to the period that interests us – can be traced back not to Christmas, but to another religious festival, St Martin's Eve, celebrated (especially in Germany and the Low Countries) each 11 November. According to Miles, it was originally St Martin – not St Nicholas – who was tasked with ascertaining whether children had been good the previous year, and – just as would later be true of St Nicholas – "Martin", in the guise of some local worthy, frequently made appearances in towns and villages to carry out these checks in person, to the delight of the children of these districts:

He is a man dressed up as a bishop, with a pastoral staff in his hand. His business is to ask if the children have been "good" and if the result of his inquiries is satisfactory, he throws down apples, nuts and cakes. If not, it is the rod he leaves behind.

The Martinmas tradition of giving and eating nuts was a popular one and was found well outside the borders of the Holy Roman Empire; it seems to have been especially significant in Malta, where the feast is still celebrated on the Sunday closest to 11 November, and where a popular saying notes: “walnuts, almonds, chestnuts, fig – oh how we love St Martin!” Throughout this period, Martinmas was a feast day that denoted the formal onset of winter in ways that make it easy to see both how nuts – the next best thing to an imperishable treat, available all year round – might be associated with a winter festival, and how that festival's traditions might have easily been transferred to Christmas. Indeed, and as Aquilana points out, another Maltese proverb makes the association an explicit one:

On St. Martin's Day we break walnuts with a hammer and in Christmas we share nuts with kisses.

Such customs, Miles records, were also found in places all along the Rhine and its delta, and would have reached the US as a result of immigration from Germany, which was at its height in the first half of the nineteenth century. The conflation of St Martin with St Nicholas occurred at roughly the same time, and so the custom of gifting children nuts at Christmas antedates that of requesting them in letters to Santa Claus, but is very probably the origin of the references that attracted your attention.

Sources

Joseph Aquilana, Maltese Meteorological and Agricultural Proverbs (1961)

Bernd Brunner, Inventing the Christmas Tree (2011)

Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (1995)

Clement A. Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (1913)

Alex Palmer, "A brief history of sending letters to Santa," Smithsonianmag.com, 3 December 2015

Douglas Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (2005)

Phil Strong, "Christmas in Iowa," The Palimpsest 38 (1957)

Logan Thatcher, Letters to Santa: Adorable Christmas Letters From Children Over a Hundred Years Ago (privately published, 2019)