Santa ClausIn 1974, staff at a
Canada Post Office in Montreal were noticing a considerable number of letters addressed to Santa Claus entering the postal system, and those letters were being treated as undeliverable. Since employees handling those letters did not want the writers (mostly young children) to be disappointed at the lack of response, they started answering the letters themselves.[33]
The amount of mail sent to Santa Claus increased every Christmas, to the point that
Canada Post established an official Santa Claus letter-response program in 1983. By 2011, Santa's mail was being handled with the assistance of 11,000 volunteers, mostly current or former postal workers,[34] at multiple locations across Canada[35][36] devoting an average of twenty-one hours to this seasonal task.
Approximately 1,000,000 letters are addressed to Santa Claus each Christmas, including some originating outside Canada, and all of them are answered in the same language in which they are written.[37]
Canada Post introduced a special address for mail to Santa Claus, complete with its own postal code:[38]
SANTA CLAUS
NORTH POLE H0H 0H0
CANADA
In French, Santa's name Père Noël translates as "Father Christmas", and mail is addressed to:
PÈRE NOËL
PÔLE NORD H0H 0H0
CANADA
The postal code H0H 0H0 was chosen for this special seasonal use as it reads "Ho ho ho".[39]
The H0- prefix is an anomaly: the 0 indicates a rural delivery zone, but H is used to designate Montreal, the second-largest city in Canada. As such, the H0- prefix is almost completely empty. H0M, assigned to the international Akwesasne tribal reserve on the Canada–US border, is the only other H0- postal code in active use.
In 2013, Santa was dragged into the ongoing Arctic sovereignty debate to support Canadian territorial claims extending to the North Pole. In response to attacks from Conservative MP Paul Calandra, parliamentary secretary to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau, at the time leader of the third-party Liberals, stated "Everyone knows that Santa Claus is Canadian. His postal code is H0H 0H0."[40]
Posted 12/23/2021 08:16 am
