Letters to Santa

 As a sort of, but not really, follow-up to yesterday's post, I'd like to talk about letters to Santa. The letters to Santa tradition is quite old. British children in the 1800s began writing the letters and burning them. The belief was that the wind would carry the ashes to the North Pole. In Mexico and Latin America, they attach their letters to helium balloon. Since 1982, Canadian children have been writing to Santa at the following address: Santa Claus, North Pole, Canada, H0H 0H0. Due to the decline of home fire places, in England Santa can now be written at: Father Christmas, North Pole, SAN TA1. Santa's most popular address is in Finland where he receives over 600,000 letters a year. The address is: Santa Claus,Santa Claus Village, FIN-96930 Arctic Circle, Finland.

I've always enjoyed the tradition of writing a letter to Santa, and I wrote many letters myself with the aid of the Sears Wish Book. My Santa letters were always sent to Colorado where Santa lived with my grandparents. It was all perfectly sensible. There is snow in Colorado and my grandparents had a barn for the reindeer. Plus, there's a North Pole there and everything.

I never got a letter in response to my letter. I always figured that the presents left were my return receipt as it were. There are a lot of services out there which offer to send you a letter for relatively small fee. My favorite of these is the one offered by the Finnish post shop.

{photo credit to Whitewall Buick on Flickr}

Comments

[Jenny]

You have to love photos like this from the days when the baby boomers were small, and children had names like "George" and "Bob," as opposed to now, when only middle-aged men have those names. <3

[Janice]

In Canada Santa is lucky to have Postal Worker elves and children always receive a reply to their Santa letters....

[Natalia]

When I was of the age when kids wrote letters to santa, Email existed in the academic world, but outside of universities/government/high tech types, no one had even heard of the internet. The web hadn't been invented yet, etc.

My dad is a professor of computer science, and the systems guys in the network created an email alias inside their network so the kids of faculty, staff, grad students, etc could send emails to santa@northpole.org (the emails were then, conveniently, forwarded to our parents) Now, of course, that doesn't sound like anything special, but at the time, it was *magical*. My father had some kind of secret, futuristic link to Santa himself.