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Girl asks police to run DNA test on Christmas cookie for evidence of Santa Claus

By Giulia Heyward
Published January 22, 2023 at 5:00 AM EST
A young girl's note to the police department asked to test for evidence of Santa.
Cumberland Police Department/Screenshot by NPR
A young girl's note to the police department asked to test for evidence of Santa.

A local police department in Rhode Island has received an unusual query: running a DNA test on evidence to prove the existence of Santa Claus.

The authorities in Cumberland, north of Providence, received a handwritten letter from a young girl earlier this month, according to a press release on Friday.

The young girl asked the police to run a DNA test on a partially eaten cookie and carrot remains presumably consumed by Santa Claus and some of his nine reindeer on Christmas Eve. The food remains were forwarded to the state's Department of Health-Forensic Sciences Unit for analysis, police said.

"This young lady obviously has a keen sense for truth and the investigative process and did a tremendous job packaging her evidence for submission," Cumberland's police chief, Matthew J. Benson, said in the release. "We will do our very best to provide answers for her."

The Cumberland Police Department responded to the young girl with "some already uncovered evidence in support of Santa Claus' presence in her neighborhood" on Christmas Eve, a photo of what appeared to be a deer with antlers. The Cumberland Police Department said it is awaiting test results, and asked residents to stay tuned for more information.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Giulia Heyward
Giulia Heyward is a weekend reporter for Digital News, based out of New York. She previously covered education and other national news as a reporting fellow at The New York Times and as the national education reporter at Capital B News. She interned for POLITICO, where she covered criminal justice reform in Florida, and CNN, as a writer for the trends & culture team. Her work has also been published in The Atlantic, HuffPost and The New Republic.
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