The Wish Jar at the Post Office

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The story

Grandmother tells how the village postmistress kept a jar for letters to Father Christmas, and one snowy year the letters were answered in a spidery hand with oddly specific presents: a brass doorknob, one left hinge, a key to a house nobody owned. The children compared notes and fitted the presents together at the edge of the woods.

How it begins

Sit still, sweetheart, and let me pull the blanket up to your chin. This is a story from the winter I was your age, in the little village of Hollowmere, where the post office sat at the bottom of the hill beside the frozen millpond. It was a squat grey building with one bell over the door and a window full of pinecones that the postmistress, Mrs. Abernathy, swept every morning whether they needed it or not. Now, Mrs. Abernathy had a wish jar. It was a big glass jar, the kind you'd keep pickled onions in, and it sat on the counter right beside the brass scales. Any child…