For parents
Santa's Helper — the parent app
Read what your child texts Santa, and answer as Santa, from your own phone. Both devices on the same Wi-Fi: messages go straight between them and nowhere else — not through the internet, not through us.
- Be on the same Wi-Fi.
- Put Texting With Santa on your child's tablet or phone.
- On your child's device: Elf Login → Elf Workshop → Connect a parent. Type the 6-digit code in Santa's Helper.
Santa's Helper is part of this season's release, for iPhone, Android phones and Fire tablets. It also shows your child's Advent Calendar — which doors they have opened, and a peek behind today's door before your child opens it (no peeking ahead) — and has a few of the games for you (the Sleigh games and the Coloring Book), with ordinary ads, since it is an app for grown-ups (no ads on Fire tablets).
Santa's Workshop Pass — an annual pass
Texting With Santa is free: texting Santa, the story, the wish list (your child's own list — Santa "can see it", and so can you in Santa's Helper), every door of the Advent Calendar, and the first three levels of every game. The Workshop Pass opens the rest (the price is shown in the app store): the top level or two of every game, every page of the Coloring Book, any level still waiting for its Advent door, and the Christmas-morning letter you write yourself, delivered on Dec 25 in Santa's texts. Santa's Helper is free, and the family's Pass counts there too, for the top level of each of its games. It is an annual pass: good from November 1 through October 31 of the next year, on the device it was bought on, through that device's store account. Each year's Pass is a new purchase. The Paid edition includes the Pass for the season it is first opened in. One Pass per family: bought in Santa's Helper it counts on your child's device, and the other way round.
Every Advent door is free. A door may tell you what the Pass also opens — and that is all it does.
No character ever asks your child to buy anything, and play is never interrupted to sell. The purchase lives behind the grown-up check.
The Elf Workshop
Behind the Elf password: write Santa's messages or pick from templates (Dec 23, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, funny), schedule them, see Santa's List (what your child asked for), choose the text theme, the notifications and the autoreply, and get an e-mail copy of what your child sends.
E-mail copies, connected first. To get copies, you type your address and we send a six-digit code to it; copies start only once you type that code back into the app. Nothing is stored on our server: your device holds a signed token for the address and shows it with each copy, and the copy itself is passed straight to the mail system. Disconnect in the app and copies stop at once. You can also connect the address in Santa's Helper, on the phone where the mail lands, and send the connection to your child's device.