BRIGHTON, ONT.—It was 1914 and Santa Claus was especially busy, filling in for all the daddies who had gone off to war. But he still found time to write to a little Toronto girl, urging her to be “just as good as you possibly can” so he could bring her a Christmas present.

“Me, oh My! But this is going to be the busiest year I have ever had,” he told Velma Robbins. “So many daddies are away from home this year that I have to be a regular daddy to heaps and heaps of children.”

The letter, handwritten on stationery decorated with pictures of toys, elves at work and Santa’s reindeer airborne over downtown Toronto, recently surfaced in Brighton, 90 minutes east, as the sleigh flies.

Velma’s niece, Dianne Brooks, found it hidden among legal documents in an old trunk that ended up in her garage after Velma died in Madoc, Ont. 15 years ago at the age of 91.

“When we opened it up, I thought, ‘oh my God’,” says Brooks, 72, who is just getting around to sorting through her aunt’s belongings. “I think she would be so excited about this.”

The letter was tucked inside its original envelope, bearing a two-cent stamp and postmarked Dec. 22 but no year. It was addressed to “Miss Velma 70 Spruce St. City.”

“The mailman would have known all the children on the street,” says Brooks, adding Velma would have been 8 years old if the letter was sent in 1914, the first year of the First World War.

That would explain why it was Santa’s “busiest year,” she says, noting he avoided the word “war.”

St. Nick tells Velma he was “delighted” to get her letter, “and to know that you do not forget old Santa Claus.” He goes on to say he will try to think of every child “who is good, and stays good, and doesn’t get cross, nor quarrel, nor cry, nor make too much noise.”

Suspecting Santa was too busy to write his own letters, Brooks thinks she knows who did after noticing a small “E” on his sleigh and a tiny Eaton’s flag on a building below.

A stenographer at Eaton’s probably handled his correspondence and elves in the art department created the stationery, Brooks believes. The T. Eaton Company, whose flagship store graced the corner of Queen and Yonge Sts., started the annual Santa Claus parade in 1905. Brooks’s husband Harold speculates that children might have left their letters to Santa at the store.

There’s another curious detail on the paper and envelope: The sleigh is drawn by 10 reindeer whereas popular belief adheres to the “eight tiny reindeer” cited in the poem, “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” said to have been written in 1822.

A century after playing surrogate daddy, Santa is still there for kids with a parent away from home due to war, observes Brooks, who plans to frame her treasured keepsake.