Original photo by loops7/ iStock
Children have been sending letters to Santa for longer than the United States Postal Service has existed to deliver them, though today, they’re far more likely to get a response. In early America, children’s holiday wish lists were often written out and left by the fireplace or burned in hearths, with the belief that the ashes would rise through the chimney and out to the holiday helper himself. Today, there’s no fireplace necessary — just a stamp — since the USPS gives Santa Claus his own address: 123 Elf Road, North Pole, 88888.
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It's a factIn 1927, the U.S. assistant secretary of commerce awarded the jolly helper a pilot’s license, so he could fly through the air if there wasn’t enough snow for his reindeer sleigh. Nearly 100 years later, in 2020, the FAA granted Santa a commercial space license.
After the creation of the Postal Service in 1775, letters to Santa began flooding mailboxes; local postmasters would sometimes intercept the mail and respond to children themselves (though this is technically mail fraud, most postal workers considered the deed an act of kindness and looked the other way). Eventually, the lack of a specific postal route for thousands of Santa letters became problematic for real-life delivery workers. By 1907, the sheer number of unanswered letters bogged down the Postal Service’s dead-letter office (the home for unclaimed or undeliverable mail), and many ended in incineration. So, the country’s postmaster allowed post offices to give Santa letters to generous individuals and charitable organizations, who then answered letters and delivered gifts. Dubbed Operation Santa in 1912, the program has continued for more than a century. It’s gotten a modern update, however: Wish lists from children and adults are anonymized and digitized, then uploaded to the USPS website, giving holiday do-gooders the chance to play Santa and reply with the kindness of a surprise gift.
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The Canadian postal code for the North Pole is ______.
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The Canadian postal code for the North Pole is H0H 0H0.
A 19th-century cartoonist gave Santa his hometown.
Why is Santa’s mailing address so far north? Turns out, the benevolent gift-giver’s association with the North Pole is all thanks to Thomas Nast, a Civil War-era political cartoonist. Nast’s version of Santa, depicted giving out gifts to Union soldiers and in other scenes in 1863, became so popular that the artist created his own backstory for the Christmastime figure. In 1866, Nast inked a drawing for Harper’s Weekly that captioned Santa’s hometown as “Santa Claussville, N.P.,” aka the North Pole. Nast may have picked the globe’s northernmost point as Santa’s home in part because so little was known about the Arctic Circle at the time, and high-profile exploration attempts of the 1840s and 1850s had brought the region into the public consciousness. No one would reach the North Pole until the early 20th century, and until then the area remained shrouded in mystery — the perfect place for reindeer and elves to work their holiday magic. The idea stuck, inspiring generations of children to address their deepest holiday wishes to the far-north imaginary workshop.
Nicole Garner Meeker is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. Her history, nature, and food stories have also appeared at Mental Floss and Better Report.
