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Santa Claus creates quite a stir each year as thousands of people, naughty and nice, try to contact him directly at his alleged home in the North Pole.
While Santa is rumored to have elves helping him with the gifts he leaves for children under Christmas trees aplenty, postal workers at 325 S. Santa Claus Lane in North Pole, Alaska, also find themselves doing his bidding each year, postmarking and moving letters the white-haired gentleman neglected.
“If it says ‘Santa,’ if it says ‘Noel,’ if it’s a page that’s ripped out of a Christmas coloring book without any postage, they send it here,” North Pole post office branch manager Donna Mathews said.
Mathews says the North Pole is inundated with around 100,000 letters each year, in many languages. If postal workers around the country look at letters thinking, “‘I don’t know what it says but it looks like it might be associated with Christmas,”’ said Mathews, “they send it to me.”
To assuage Santa’s workload, postal workers are asking people wishing to receive the North Pole postmark on their letters to mail the stamped, addressed envelope inside another envelope to: North Pole Christmas Cancellation Postmaster, 5400 Mail Trail, Fairbanks, AK, 99709, before Dec. 15.
Beginning in 1912, letters addressed to Santa were turned over to volunteers or charities that attempted to respond to them. However, today the volume of letters is such that sometimes responding to all letters is impossible.
Debra Cornelius, a customer service employee at the post office in Fairbanks, says she is already receiving 8,000 “Dear Santa” letters per day. She said residents of North Pole, Alaska, live in Christmas’ happy shadow year-round, with candy canes adorning the outside of the post office and Christmas decorations up all year.
“Did you not know this is where Santa lives?” Cornelius asked. “Of course, reality comes along too fast for all of us, so if that little cancellation helps to prove that there is a Santa, we are OK with that.”
In the Bay Area, volunteers wishing to respond to the 30,000 letters Santa receives should contact the San Jose post office at (408) 723-6110, the Oakland post office at (510) 251-3373 or the San Francisco post office at (415) 371-5160.
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