“Dear Santa ...”
Sam Oesterling, 78, of Cabot still has a letter to Santa that he carefully wrote out in cursive at the age of 9.
“I suppose my dad or mom coaxed me into it,” he said of the letter, which served as his Christmas list.
After addressing the letter to “S. Santa Street, North Pole,” he went on to ask for skis, a set of bagpipes and a bathrobe.
“I dearly wanted a pair of skis,” said Oesterling, who happily received them that Christmas. “I just wanted to try my hand at that. I had a sled but I never had skis.”
The bagpipes finally came about five years ago, he added.
Oesterling also has a Christmas stocking made for him by his grandmother, Elizabeth Oesterling, better known to the children as Grandma Lizzie.
The childsized white stocking has a jingle bell on top and his name, “Sammy,” stitched across the bottom.
“I loved my grandmother and I just thought it was great that she did it for us, for all of the kids,” he said.
She hand made stockings for more than 20 grandchildren and personalized them with their names, which made the holiday all the more exciting, Oesterling said.
“At that age, Christmas was just the most wonderful day of the year,” he said “I looked forward to it so much as a kid.”
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