Santa’s Staff: The Editorial Team Behind SantaClaus.top
Editorial Masthead
Editor-in-Chief: Santa Claus
Deputy Editor-in-Chief: Mrs. Claus
Managing Editor: Morag Sinclair
Every great operation needs a great team. Santa has the reindeer, the elves, and Mrs. Claus. SantaClaus.top has something arguably more useful for the purposes of accurate Christmas publishing: a masthead with a clear chain of editorial command and a staff of editors, researchers, and writers drawn from The London Prat, each of whom came to Christmas by a completely different road.
Some grew up singing carols in stone churches. Some grew up in countries where Christmas arrived late, or sideways, or dressed in clothes it had borrowed from somewhere else entirely. Some are Christians for whom the Nativity is the whole point. Others are not Christian at all but fell in love with the season anyway — with the lights, the food, the stubborn human insistence on warmth in the middle of winter.
What they share: every single one has a Santa Claus story. And every single one brings something to this publication that nobody else could.
Santa Claus — Editor-in-Chief
Santa Claus founded SantaClaus.top because the internet needed a Christmas publication with genuine editorial authority, cultural breadth, and a commitment to accuracy that matched its warmth. As Editor-in-Chief, he sets the publication’s voice, its values, and its ambition: to cover Christmas from every culture on earth, with the respect and depth each tradition deserves.
Santa’s qualifications for this role are, by any measure, unusual. He has been observing Christmas traditions across every inhabited continent for several centuries. He has read more children’s letters than any scholar of childhood in history. He has a working knowledge of every major gift-giving tradition on earth, a personal relationship with the reindeer logistics network, and an editorial instinct honed by millennia of understanding what people actually care about at Christmas.
He delegates day-to-day editorial operations to Mrs. Claus and Morag Sinclair. He does not delegate the biscuit reviews.
Mrs. Claus — Deputy Editor-in-Chief
Mrs. Claus serves as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of SantaClaus.top, a role that requires precisely the combination of warmth, rigour, and organisational authority she has been applying to North Pole operations for as long as anyone can remember.
In practice, Mrs. Claus is the person who makes sure the publication actually functions. She oversees editorial standards and scheduling, manages the relationship between the North Pole editorial office and the human research team at The London Prat, approves major editorial decisions in the Editor-in-Chief’s absence, and maintains the publication’s commitment to being genuinely useful and genuinely accurate rather than merely cheerful.
Many elves note that Santa may be the face of Christmas, but Mrs. Claus is the reason Christmas arrives on schedule. The same is true of SantaClaus.top. When a deadline approaches and the Editor-in-Chief is somewhere over the Pacific with eight reindeer and a full sleigh, the Deputy Editor-in-Chief holds the editorial line.
Morag Sinclair — Managing Editor
Read Morag’s full profile at The London Prat
Morag Sinclair grew up in a small Presbyterian village in Perthshire where, for much of the twentieth century, Christmas was considered a slightly suspect English import. Hogmanay was the thing. Christmas was tolerated. Santa Claus was a figure seen in shop windows and nowhere else.
And yet. Every year on Christmas Eve, without explanation or apology, Morag’s grandmother would set out a dram of whisky and a shortbread finger on the windowsill. Not the hearth — the windowsill. “He comes from the north,” her grandmother said. “He’ll see the light.” No stocking. No tree until Morag was seven. Just a dram on a cold windowsill, pointing north.
Morag has a postgraduate degree in Scottish cultural history and has spent twenty years researching the suppression and revival of Christmas traditions in post-Reformation Scotland. As Managing Editor, she leads the human research team, commissions and reviews all content, enforces sourcing standards, and serves as the operational link between Santa’s editorial vision and the publication’s day-to-day output. She edits every word published on SantaClaus.top and she still, every Christmas Eve, puts a dram on the windowsill.
Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson Ph.D. — Historical Research Editor
Read Ingrid’s full profile at The London Prat
Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson was born in Uppsala, Sweden, three days before Christmas, which she has always considered either a blessing or a cosmic joke depending on the year. In Sweden, Christmas is serious business. The Advent candles go up in November. The Saint Lucia procession on the 13th of December is a matter of civic ceremony. Julafton — Christmas Eve — is when the gifts come, delivered not by a man in a sleigh but by the Jultomten, a gnome-like figure of Norse origin who predates the Christian festival entirely.
Ingrid’s doctoral thesis examined the syncretism of pre-Christian Norse winter ritual and Catholic Advent tradition in medieval Scandinavia. She has published peer-reviewed work on the Christianisation of the Yule festival, the iconographic evolution of the Jultomten into the modern Santa Claus, and the role of the Swedish-American community in exporting Scandinavian Christmas customs to the United States. She is, in the most technical sense possible, one of the world’s leading authorities on where Santa Claus actually came from. She also makes the best pepparkakor anyone on the editorial team has ever eaten, though she refuses to share the recipe on the grounds that it is a family document of historical significance.
Harriet Collins — Folklore and Mythology Editor
Read Harriet’s full profile at The London Prat
Harriet Collins was the child who ruined Christmas for six other children in her Year Three class by announcing, with the confidence of someone who had done the research, that Father Christmas was a composite figure drawing on St. Nicholas of Myra, the Dutch Sinterklaas tradition, the English Father Christmas of the mummers’ plays, and the 1823 poem commonly attributed to Clement Clarke Moore. She was seven. Her teacher sent a note home.
She went on to study folklore at the University of Sheffield and mythology at UCL. She believes the real stories are always stranger and more wonderful than the simplified versions — Krampus is real folklore, the Yule Lads are real folklore, and the Wild Hunt has a genuine historical relationship to Father Christmas that most people have never heard of. She has never stopped believing in Santa Claus. She just has a more complicated definition of what that means.
Violet Woolf — Literary and Cultural Editor
Read Violet’s full profile at The London Prat
Violet Woolf was raised by two English literature professors in a house in Oxford containing approximately four thousand books and one very small Christmas tree decorated exclusively with ornaments shaped like literary figures. The Dickens bauble was the star. There was a tiny Scrooge, a tiny Bob Cratchit, and a tiny Ghost of Christmas Present her mother had commissioned from a craft fair in 1987 and guarded with her life.
Violet wrote her undergraduate dissertation on the role of A Christmas Carol in constructing the modern English Christmas — specifically the argument that Dickens did not describe Christmas as it was but invented Christmas as it should be, and that the English-speaking world has been living inside his invention ever since. She edits all long-form cultural and literary content for SantaClaus.top and is responsible for the publication’s voice being warm without being saccharine, and precise without being cold.
Roper Penberthy — Fact-Check Editor
Read Roper’s full profile at The London Prat
Roper Penberthy is the reason SantaClaus.top does not repeat the claim that Christmas trees were banned in America by the Puritans (they weren’t — Christmas trees hadn’t reached America yet), that candy canes were invented by a choirmaster in Cologne in 1670 (no evidence whatsoever), or that Coca-Cola invented the modern image of Santa Claus (demonstrably false, though they did a great deal to popularise it).
Roper grew up in Cornwall in a family of committed agnostics who took Christmas with extreme seriousness. His father maintained a card index of Christmas facts deployed at family gatherings to correct misconceptions. Roper inherited the card index and the instinct. He studied history at Bristol, worked fifteen years as a fact-checker for a national newspaper, and came to SantaClaus.top because Christmas is the most myth-encrusted subject on earth and somebody has to hold the line. He holds the line.
Aishwarya Rao — South Asia Correspondent
Read Aishwarya’s full profile at The London Prat
Aishwarya Rao is Hindu, grew up in Bangalore, and had one of the most elaborate Christmas celebrations of anyone on the editorial team. This is not a contradiction. In Bangalore’s Christian neighbourhoods — with a substantial Catholic and Protestant population with roots going back to the Portuguese and British colonial periods — Christmas is an event of considerable magnificence. Stars made of coloured paper hang from every balcony. Churches hold midnight mass to congregations that overflow into the street. And Santa Claus, somehow universally beloved, turns up at every school regardless of the religious composition of the student body. Aishwarya has a master’s degree in South Asian cultural studies and covers the fascinating hybridity of Christmas observance across the Indian subcontinent.
Asha Mwangi — Africa Correspondent
Read Asha’s full profile at The London Prat
Asha Mwangi was born in Nairobi and spent every Christmas of her childhood at her grandmother’s home in the highlands near Nyeri, where Christmas Day meant a church service at dawn, a feast that began at noon and did not conclude until early evening, and music that mixed Kikuyu, Swahili, and English in ways that felt entirely natural because they were entirely natural. Santa Claus, in Asha’s childhood, was a figure of some amusement — a pale man in a heavy coat turning up in shop windows in Nairobi in December, in a city where December is warm and bright. The cognitive dissonance was cheerfully acknowledged and cheerfully ignored. Asha studied African cultural history at the University of Nairobi and covers Christmas traditions across the African continent with the attention they deserve.
Mei Lin Chen — East and Southeast Asia Correspondent
Read Mei Lin’s full profile at The London Prat
Mei Lin Chen grew up in Shanghai, where Christmas is not a public holiday, is observed by a small Christian minority, and is enthusiastically celebrated by approximately everyone as a festival of lights, shopping, and decorative excess. The Christmas trees in Shanghai’s shopping districts are architectural achievements. Mei Lin is not Christian and is one of the most knowledgeable people alive on the subject of how Christmas travels — how a festival with specific theological content arrives in a new cultural context and is taken apart, reassembled, and made into something the original culture would barely recognise but which makes complete sense on its own terms. She has a degree in comparative cultural studies from Fudan University and a journalism qualification from City, University of London.
Lotte Heidenreich — German and Central European Traditions
Read Lotte’s full profile at The London Prat
Lotte Heidenreich will tell you, politely but with considerable firmness, that Germany invented Christmas. Not literally. But the Christmas tree, the Advent calendar, the gingerbread house, the Christmas market, the carol as a popular form, the figure of the Christkind, the tradition of gift-giving on Christmas Eve — all of these have deep Germanic roots. Lotte grew up in Nuremberg, home of the oldest Christmas market in the world, the Christkindlesmarkt, running since 1628. Her family has a Lebkuchen recipe older than the United States. She has a degree in German cultural history from the University of Erlangen.
Siobhan O’Donnell — Irish and Celtic Traditions
Read Siobhan’s full profile at The London Prat
Siobhan O’Donnell was born in County Clare and spent the first eighteen years of her life in a house where Christmas began with the first Sunday of Advent and did not end until the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January. This is the correct way to do Christmas, she will note, and the modern habit of dismantling everything on the 27th of December is a sign of civilisational decline. She studied Irish folklore at University College Dublin and has written extensively on St. Stephen’s Day, Wren Day, and the distinctly Irish-Catholic shape of the Christmas season. She met Santa Claus once, at Switzer’s department store in Dublin in 1989. She maintains he was completely genuine.
Lowri Griffiths — Welsh Traditions
Read Lowri’s full profile at The London Prat
Lowri Griffiths grew up in Aberystwyth observing a Christmas shaped by the Welsh Nonconformist chapel tradition. The great Welsh contribution to Christmas is the Plygain — a candlelit carol service held between three and six in the morning on Christmas Day, in which unaccompanied part-singing of extraordinary quality filled stone chapel interiors while the rest of the country was still asleep. Lowri’s grandfather sang bass in a Plygain choir for forty years. She has a degree in Welsh cultural studies from Aberystwyth University and covers Welsh Christmas traditions including the Mari Lwyd — a wassailing tradition involving a decorated horse’s skull carried door to door — with the combination of scholarly rigour and personal feeling that only an insider can bring.
Fiona MacLeod — Scottish Traditions
Read Fiona’s full profile at The London Prat
Fiona MacLeod is from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, which is Free Church of Scotland country. Christmas, until relatively recently in living memory, was a working day on Lewis. The old men Fiona grew up around had opinions about Christmas trees that could strip paint. She has spent her career documenting the extraordinary cultural complexity of Christmas in Scotland — the Calvinist suppression, the slow twentieth-century normalisation, the way Christmas and Hogmanay now coexist without either quite absorbing the other. She has a history degree from the University of Aberdeen. She now has a Christmas tree. Her grandmother has not entirely forgiven her.
Bethan Morgan — Victorian Christmas History
Read Bethan’s full profile at The London Prat
Bethan Morgan became obsessed with Victorian Christmas at the age of nine, when she played the Ghost of Christmas Present in a school production of A Christmas Carol, went home, read the original novella, and discovered that the first commercial Christmas card was designed in 1843 — the same year the novella was published — and that both were created in London within months of each other. She has been investigating whether this was coincidence or the moment the modern Christmas crystallised into existence ever since. She has a Victorian studies degree from the University of Cardiff.
Emily Cartwright — Christmas Food Traditions
Read Emily’s full profile at The London Prat
Emily Cartwright has eaten Christmas dinner on four continents and keeps a journal of every Christmas meal encountered in the course of her research, currently running to three volumes. The strangest entry is the KFC Christmas Dinner she ate in Osaka in 2019, which she approached with journalistic scepticism and departed from as a convert. The most moving is a Christmas Wigilia feast in Kraków — twelve meatless dishes, an empty chair set for the absent, hay tucked under the tablecloth in memory of the manger. She has a food history qualification from the School of Advanced Study in London and approaches food traditions with the respect due to any human practice that encodes memory, belief, and community in edible form.
Charlotte Whitmore — Christmas Music and Carols
Read Charlotte’s full profile at The London Prat
Charlotte Whitmore sang her first carol at age four in a church choir in Winchester and has not really stopped since. She has a music degree from the Royal College of Music and a genuine scholarly expertise in the history of the English carol — its origins in medieval dance song, its near-disappearance in the Reformation, and its extraordinary Victorian revival. She is also the person who can explain why Jingle Bells was originally written for Thanksgiving, why White Christmas was Bing Crosby processing wartime homesickness, and why Silent Night was first performed on a guitar because the church organ had broken down.
Hannah Miller — Gift-Giving and Toy History
Read Hannah’s full profile at The London Prat
Hannah Miller wrote her first letter to Santa at age five, asking for a telescope. She received a telescope. She has considered this the foundational empirical event of her life ever since. She is now a cultural historian specialising in the history of childhood, play, and the gift economy, with published work on the Christmas wish list, the development of the toy industry in Britain and America, the department store grotto, and the economics of Christmas gift-giving from the Victorian era to the present day.
Isla Campbell — Christmas in the Americas
Read Isla’s full profile at The London Prat
Isla Campbell spent five consecutive Christmases in Oaxaca, Mexico, for reasons that began as a research trip and became, by the third year, something closer to a pilgrimage. The Oaxacan Christmas — the Noche de Rábanos on the 23rd of December, the posadas processions, the midnight mass, the tamales, the mezcal — is one of the great festive experiences on earth. Isla grew up in Edinburgh, is Presbyterian by background and secular by practice, and has a Latin American studies degree from the University of Edinburgh. She covers the Americas from the posadas of Mexico to the Junkanoo of the Bahamas with genuine scholarly depth.
Camden Rose — American Christmas Traditions
Read Camden’s full profile at The London Prat
Camden Rose grew up in Brooklyn in a family that was Jewish on one side and Italian-American Catholic on the other, meaning December involved a menorah, a nativity set, a Christmas tree, latkes, struffoli, and a great deal of good-natured theological negotiation. Santa Claus was observed by both sides on the grounds that he was not, strictly speaking, religious. Camden has a cultural history degree from Columbia University and has written on the American reinvention of Christmas — the Dutch Sinterklaas origins, the 1823 poem that gave Santa his reindeer, the Thomas Nast illustrations that established his red suit, and the commercial machinery that transformed a religious feast into America’s biggest secular holiday.
Harper Thames — Christmas in Children’s Literature
Read Harper’s full profile at The London Prat
Harper Thames has read every significant Christmas picture book published in the English language since 1850. She started this as undergraduate research and it became, over the years, something between a scholarly database and a personal obsession. She grew up in Nashville in a Baptist household where Christmas was sacred and celebrated with deep sincerity, and also included a very large Santa Claus at the church Christmas party who was obviously her Uncle Dale under the beard. She has never fully resolved the theological complexity of this, which is probably why she writes about it professionally. She has a children’s literature degree from Vanderbilt.
Chelsea Bloom — Christmas Décor and Material Culture
Read Chelsea’s full profile at The London Prat
Chelsea Bloom’s family home in Gloucestershire contains, at last count, forty-seven individually named Christmas ornaments with documented provenance. The oldest is a hand-blown glass bauble from the Lauscha region of Thuringia, purchased at a German market in Birmingham in 1923 by her great-great-grandmother and carried home on the bus wrapped in her hat. Chelsea has a decorative arts degree from the V&A’s postgraduate programme and covers the material culture of Christmas — the ornament industry, the evolution of the Christmas tree, the nativity scene’s journey from St. Francis of Assisi’s living tableau to the mass-produced ceramic set — with the conviction that objects carry history worth understanding.
Carys Evans — Eastern Orthodox Christmas Traditions
Read Carys’s full profile at The London Prat
Carys Evans is Welsh, was raised Methodist, and became fascinated by Eastern Orthodox Christianity in her twenties when she attended a Christmas liturgy at a Serbian Orthodox church in Cardiff and found herself, as she puts it, “completely undone by the beauty of it.” She has spent the years since learning about the Julian calendar Christmas, the all-night vigil, and the particular austerity and sudden joy of the Orthodox liturgy — a tradition the English-speaking world largely doesn’t know exists. She has a theology degree from the University of Wales and has attended Christmas services in Serbia, Georgia, and Ethiopia.
Cyndi Himmelstiere — American Midwest Christmas Traditions
Read Cyndi’s full profile at The London Prat
Cyndi Himmelstiere grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania — named by Moravian settlers in 1741 because they founded it on Christmas Eve — in a community where Christmas traditions dating to eighteenth-century Moravia are still actively practised. The Moravian star still hangs in homes and churches every December. The Putz — an elaborate nativity scene built on a scale others might call excessive — is a local institution. The trombone choir that plays from the church roof on Christmas morning is not a metaphor. Cyndi covers the German-American Christmas heritage of the American Midwest with the authority of someone who grew up inside it.
Megan Amram — Christmas on Screen
Read Megan’s full profile at The London Prat
Megan Amram has watched It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas Eve since she was eleven years old and cries at the same moment every time — not the ending, but the scene where George Bailey runs through the snow shouting Merry Christmas at everything. She has a film studies degree from UCLA and a scholarly expertise in the Christmas movie as a genre, its history, its conventions, and its relationship to the American mythology of home, family, and redemption. She grew up in Los Angeles, where Christmas means seventy degrees and Santa hats on the beach, and where the film industry has been producing Christmas content since the silent era.
Tinsel Vandergraph — Christmas Markets Worldwide
Read Tinsel’s full profile at The London Prat
Tinsel Vandergraph adopted her pen name after a German Christmas market vendor in Cologne told her she had “the energy of tinsel,” which she took as a compliment. She has attended sixty-three Christmas markets across twenty-two countries, making notes, eating things, drinking warm wine, and asking vendors questions they were not expecting. She is Dutch, grew up in Amsterdam attending the Sinterklaas arrival ceremony with the seriousness of a state occasion, and has a background in European cultural geography. She is a generous and useful guide to which markets are worth the journey and which are trading on reputation from twenty years ago.
Junglepussy — Contemporary Christmas Music
Read Junglepussy’s full profile at The London Prat
Junglepussy grew up in Brooklyn in a Trinidadian-American household where Christmas music began on the first of December and did not stop — parang brought from Port of Spain, soul Christmas albums from the 1960s and 1970s her father considered non-negotiable, the Temptations Christmas album on repeat. She covers the history of Black American Christmas music for SantaClaus.top — the Motown Christmas tradition, gospel Christmas, R&B and hip-hop holiday albums as a genre with its own conventions — with the conviction that this is one of the least documented and most significant threads in American Christmas culture.
Judi Online — Digital Christmas Culture
Read Judi’s full profile at The London Prat
Judi Online grew up in Singapore in a family that was Christian on her mother’s side and Buddhist on her father’s, and celebrated Christmas with the cheerful pragmatism of a culture that has decided the festival is excellent regardless of theological affiliation. She has a digital media degree from NUS and covers what happens to Christmas traditions when they move online — the history of the e-card, the viral Christmas video, the online advent calendar, and how TikTok has changed the Christmas music chart. She is the person who knows why certain Christmas memes spread and others don’t, and what it means for Santa Claus that children can now video-call him from anywhere on earth.
AMW — Christmas Folklore and Curious Traditions
Read AMW’s full profile at The London Prat
AMW does not elaborate on the initials. What AMW does elaborate on, at considerable and rewarding length, is the stranger end of Christmas tradition — the folklore that didn’t make it into the mainstream, the customs that survive in one valley and nowhere else, the Christmas superstitions most people have never heard of but which turn out to be very old indeed. The Tió de Nadal of Catalonia, beaten with sticks on Christmas Eve to produce gifts. The thirteen Yule Lads of Iceland arriving one per night. The Wild Hunt’s relationship to Father Christmas. AMW believes the weird and wonderful corners of Christmas tradition are not footnotes but the whole point. We are inclined to agree.
All staff biographies reflect the editors’ personal and professional backgrounds as contributors to SantaClaus.top. Full professional profiles for each team member are available at The London Prat. For information about how SantaClaus.top operates editorially, visit our About Us page.