Photo by John Bohnen, courtesy of Touch and Go Records.

For almost 20 years, Steve Albini and his wife, Heather Whinna, have spent their Christmases delivering gift parcels to needy families in the Chicago area. Albini has written an essay for the Huffington Post about why they started, and why they continue.

It all began when Whinna happened upon letters that people had written to Santa Claus, sitting in a pile at the post office. Albini writes:

These weren’t impish requests for toys or a new bike; mostly, they were desperate pleas from heads of households asking for help. It was staggering. People let down by the remnants of a social safety net, without families or abandoned by their families, people suffering sickness, poverty and abuse. People so far out on a limb that they swallowed what pride they had left, took pen in hand and wrote down everything that had failed them, everything that had broken or been stolen, everything that had hurt them and made them feel fear and shame and worry.

 He adds, “She took one of the letters home and showed it to me. I couldn’t help but be moved when I read it, and the realization that there were hundreds — no, thousands — of these letters changed something in me.”

So Albini and Whinna decided to answer the letter themselves, delivering a package to the family on Christmas morning. Over the years, they started delivering to more and more families. 

Whinna works at Second City, and in 2002, the theater group began raising money for Albini and Whinna’s delivery program through their annual 24-hour improv show. Many musicians and comedians have participated in the “Letters to Santa” show over the past 13 years, including Jeff Tweedy, the Breeders, the Mountain Goats, Will Oldham, and more. This year’s show, which is currently streaming until this evening, featured Tweedy, Thao Nguyen, Kim Deal, A.C. Newman, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, plus Fred Armisen, Vanessa Bayer, Aidy Bryant, Jack McBrayer, Horatio Sanz, and more.

In his essay, Albini talks about recruiting Tweedy and his family, Armisen, and more to help with the package delivery. (Armisen, he says, works as a Spanish translator at certain houses.) 

A few years ago, Albini wrote about how the U.S. Postal Service no longer shares the direct addresses of people who write the letters, instead requiring that packages be sent through the mail. This is a problem, Albini writes now, because many of the letter writers don’t have secure mail delivery. Now, he and Whinna work with Onward Neighborhood House so they can make face-to-face deliveries. 

In his essay, Albini reserves particular ire for the landlords who enable the unstable living conditions of many needy people:

The places the poor and afraid are forced to live–single rooms, dirt-floored basements, empty garages and storage cubicles–makes me simultaneously shudder with both the indignity of their plight and rage that there is a class of man who could extort rent for such an existence. Who is that motherfucker, that piece of shit that chases people into a basement using fear as a torch? Bring me to him so I can spit in his eye.

Albini concludes, “I haven’t had a conventional Christmas morning in almost 20 years. I haven’t missed it.”

Watch Tweedy perform “Black Eye” at the 2010 Second City benefit: