Director: Dana Nachman, Chelsea Matter
Every winter, hundreds of thousands of letters addressed simply to Santa Claus land in post offices across the United States, and Dear Santa follows the surprisingly moving system built to answer them.
What is Dear Santa about?
This 2024 documentary steps inside Operation Santa, the long-running U.S. Postal Service program that lets ordinary people adopt real children's letters to Santa and quietly fulfill the wishes written inside. Cameras follow postal workers sorting mountains of handwritten notes, volunteers choosing which letters to answer, and families who never learn the identity of the strangers who granted their requests. Some letters ask for toys or winter coats; others reveal hardship, grief, or hope that a family is barely holding onto. Rather than staying sentimental on the surface, the film traces how a century-old mail tradition turned into a quiet, nationwide act of generosity, and it puts faces to both the children who write and the adults who choose to answer them.
Cast & crew
As a documentary, Dear Santa is built around real postal workers, volunteers, and families rather than a scripted cast. Directors Dana Nachman and Chelsea Matter shape the film from these firsthand accounts, letting the people who write and answer the letters carry the story.
Context & significance
Produced in the United States and released in 2024, the film runs 84 minutes and carries a 6.5 rating on IMDb. It sits in the family genre, aimed at holiday-season viewing, and focuses on the decades-old Operation Santa program rather than on any single fictional storyline.
Where & how to watch
Dear Santa is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, making it an easy pick for family viewing in Farsi. The film's page can be read for free by anyone, and streaming it only requires logging into a K-Time account, within an experience designed around Farsi-language navigation for viewers in the diaspora.