Pretty much as long as Santa has been Santaing, kids have been trying to send him messages through various means, including, of course, in written form. But when these written messages are mailed, what do the post offices’ the world over actually do with the letters? Well, it turns out, some rather interesting things in some regions, such as in the United States where a letter to Santa addressed correctly actually has a decent chance of not just getting answered by a letter from Santa, but also with some or all of the gifts requested being mailed to the child who wrote the letter if the family could use the help that Christmas. How does this work? Well, hitch up your reindeer, get out your lunge whip and ho-hos, and let’s go to town on this one, shall we?

First, a brief background on the whole sending letters to Santa thing. Throughout the surprisingly long history of some version of Saint Nick, there have been a variety of manifestations of this bastion of holiday cheer. Things started to solidify into more of what we typically think of as Santa today during the 19th century. Specifically, on December 23, 1823, the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, better known today as The Night Before Christmas, was first published. The poem appeared in the New York Sentinel with no author listed, having been delivered for publication by a friend of Clement Clarke Moore, who was a professor of Greek and Oriental literature and who is generally considered today to have been the author. However, Moore didn’t claim authorship of the poem until long after it was published. It is thought he was initially hesitant because he was a very well respected scholar and didn’t want to be associated with what is essentially a fantastical children’s poem. However, he was later convinced by his own children to include it in his 1844 anthology of his works, and from then on reluctantly admitted he wrote it.

In any event, as alluded to, before this poem was published, traditions surrounding St. Nicholas were numerous with no real set, near universally accepted idea of “Santa Claus” like we have today. Elements of the Santa tradition that ended up being popularized by this poem include: the names and number of Santa’s reindeer (Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen, with the latter Donder and Blitzen meaning “Thunder” and “Lightning” by the way); Santa’s means of transportation; that Santa Claus visited houses on Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day; the overall appearance of Santa Clause; and that Santa brought toys to children.

One interesting thing to point out, however, is that while the general appearance, in terms of the flowing beard, rosy cheeks, etc., of Santa Claus was popularized by this poem, the Santa we know today has had one very big change over Moore’s description- namely that Santa is now big. If you go back and read the actual poem, you’ll note that Moore described St. Nick, (who he never called Santa Clause) as “a little old driver,” with a “little round belly… chubby and plump.” He also described St. Nick riding a “miniature sleigh” with “eight tiny reindeer” that had little hooves. This, of course, explains how St. Nick was able to fit down a chimney without any magical means necessary- he was a tiny little elf.

Moving on from there, it was political cartoonist Thomas Nast’s various late 19th century Santa likeness that cemented the modern image of Mr. Claus. Appearing in Harper’s Weekly, these depictions showed him as a rotund, happy, white bearded man with a giant sack of toys. It was also Nast, in the description, who gave him a North Pole located workshop, elves and a wife – Mrs. Claus. For the last 140 plus years, our vision of Santa Claus is pretty much what Moore and Nast helped popularize.

Not only helping along our traditions of what Santa looks like, more pertinent to the topic at hand, in 1879 Nast also created an image depicting a child mailing a letter to Santa which seems to have ramped up the practice.

This brings us all back to the letters. Letters have been exchanged with Santa for centuries, with many surviving examples, for example, from the early 19th century. Noteworthy in these early instances, it seems it was common to have Santa write the kids letters as well. With most of the surviving early 19th century examples having largely been about the behavior of the kids and offering advice to the child on this front, which was a huge part of the point of Santa in the earliest days.

Essentially, it was common to use Santa as a way to get better obedience from the littles, not unlike today really where, as Christmas approaches, many a parent leverages the whole “he knows if you’ve been good or bad” thing to manipulate kids to better behavior. For example, to encourage them to not tell lies, via telling the kids Santa Clause is watching them… for some reason even when they are sleeping… which we’re guessing has nothing at all to do with kids’ propensity to get out of bed after being tucked, despite their parents telling them not to. On that note, also that Santa won’t bring them the presents they have asked for if they don’t do as they are told. Bringing in the other tried and true staple of parenting- bribing the little ankle biters.

Incorporating yet another long time staple of parenting, physical violence against their person, one of the first known images of Santa Claus in the U.S. was not a jolly old fellow, but rather an 1810 depiction of him holding a switch over a crying child. Another early depiction shows him leaving a beating rod as a gift, with a note telling the parents to use it on said child with impunity whenever he strays from a virtuous path- the gift that keeps on giving the whole year.

As the century progressed, things became a little less abusive, for instance we have this mid-19th century example of a letter written by Fanny Longfellow, who wrote to her kids from Santa about various ways they could improve, such as, “You have picked up some naughty words which I hope you will throw away as you would sour or bitter fruit… Try to stop to think before you use any, and remember if no one else hears you God is always near.”

Of course, many of these letters were never actually mailed, rather traditionally left next to some form of a fireplace to be picked up or left by Santa. However, as the 19th century progressed, it seems to have become more and more common to actually mail letters through the postal system to Santa, particularly as postage became cheaper and cheaper.

As for the types of things the kids writing these letters used to ask for, one 19th century example that ultimately got quoted in a contemporary edition of The Times, stated the child wanted, “a big wagon—not so very big—four wheels, two packs pop-crackers, a Mother Hubbard book.” Other letter writers requested things like “a stick of pomade” for their dad, prayer books, writing desks, coal for their fires to keep warm in the winter; there is even one adult woman who wrote to Santa asking for a “tall, stately, well bred… man of wealth with a steady income.” Essentially, in the early going people seem to have been fairly practical for the most part, though requests for dolls and candy and other such more fun items became more and more of a thing as the century progressed.

As for someone outside of Santa specifically fulfilling the requests being mailed, this, for the most part, wasn’t a thing in the 19th century, outside of some specific exceptions. For example, in 1894 one letter by a girl named Fannie was selected out by Connecticut’s postmaster Harris Eames and read, resulting in Eames deciding to rally people to respond. He later stated of this, “On Christmas eve … everybody walked up the steps on tiptoe and deposited the load of presents against the front door … When everything was safely in place the door was given a thunderous knock, and the crowd fled in haste to the gate and then all hid behind the little fence … The door slowly opened, and for a moment Fannie’s night-gowned figure stood framed in the doorway. She saw Santa Claus’s gifts and with shrieks of delight, called to her mother.”

As for the rest of the letters, as the Post Office didn’t deliver to the North Pole, these generally found their way to the dead letter office for further processing. As one article published in a 1906 edition of The Times noted, “The Christmas season has no charm for the prosaic employees of the Dead Letter Office. It means only a lot of extra work and bother for them.”

Now, as we’ve noted in our video What Happens to Undeliverable Mail with No Return Address?, normally, for example with the U.S. Postal Service’ dead letter office, they go to pretty extreme lengths to try to track down a recipient or return address for various undeliverable mail. This includes allowing their recovery clerks to open the letters or packages, making them the only individuals in the US legally allowed to open another real person’s mail without it being a federal crime. Noteworthy here, the postal service states over half of all dead mail eventually makes it to the recipient or back to the original sender. The problem with letters to Santa is that he is, shall we say, outside of their ability to deliver to. And, as such, they simply sorted the letters to Santa out and destroyed them.

However, this all began to change around the early 20th century, when certain charitable organizations started expressing interest in becoming Santa’s helpers via responding to these letters to Santa. And so it was that in 1907, Postmaster General George Meyer decided to allow postal centers, if they wanted, to give these letters to Santa to various organizations or people that wanted them for the purpose of fulfilling the requests in some of them. While, again, technically illegal to open someone else’s mail, when it comes to letters to Santa, nobody seemed intent on prosecuting anyone who opened these. However, because humans like to complain about every little change no matter how positive the intent, there was, nonetheless, considerable backlash about this after the fact. Thus, the following year, Postmaster General Meyer decided not to continue the experiment and the letters then were all funneled once again to the dead letter office and ultimately destroyed.

However, deciding listening to the minority’s negative Nancyness wasn’t a good general policy, in 1911, a new Postmaster General, Frank Hitchcock, decided to renew the program and decreed that any letters “addressed plainly and unmistakably to ‘Santa Claus’” be sent to “responsible institutions or individuals.” By 1913, this became a permanent thing. However, once again, not without controversy, with various individuals over the years attempting to ruin the fun for everyone. Chief among them was a not so fine fellow by the name of John Gluck. Gluck helped found the Santa Claus Association in 1913, with the organization functioning as a sort of middle man between kids and Santa via the US Postal Service. Collecting funds and gifts to use to fulfill the wishes in the letters sent through U.S. Mail.

The problem here was that Gluck seemingly never had any intention of answering letters, and instead just thought it was a great way for people to give him money that he could then just keep for himself instead of buying Christmas gifts for impoverished children as was the original intent here. As for the scope of the massive sum of money he stole from children over the course of about a decade and a half, in 1915 alone he conducted a fundraiser which raised $300,000 (about $5 million today) for a new building for the growing association… and then proceeded to pocket most of the money. He continued to collect massive sums of money every year until the fact that he was keeping most of the money was discovered in 1928. Naturally, USPS ended their association with the organization, though Gluck got off scot-free and afterwards simply moved with his wife to Florida where they started a real estate company. He ultimately died in 1951 at the age of 73, and has since no doubt been roasting in Hell as a guest of Krampus the Christmas Demon.

Despite such controversies, the USPS program, now called Operation Santa, has endured with great success at what it is actually intended to do- helping Santa make Christmas morning a little nicer for impoverished kids. Fast-forward to the 1960s and Johnny Carson helped further popularize the whole thing via reading off such letters on the Tonight Show and encouraging people to get involved in the program.

We’ll get into the modern and exceptionally cool version of Operation Santa shortly, but it’s also noteworthy that there exists another program of simply having Santa answer letters that exists as a part of most nations of the world’s postal systems. For example, across the pond in the UK, the Royal Mail will make sure letters sent to Santa / Father Christmas, Santa’s Grotto, Reindeerland, XM4 5HQ will receive a response from Santa within about 10 days starting at the end of November. In Canada, their postal system has the same service, but with perhaps the best address for Santa thanks to its post code- specifically, to receive a reply from Santa in Canada, you write to Santa Claus, North Pole, H0H 0H0. And, again, it seems that most countries have a similar program to make sure kids’ letters get answered so long as letters to Santa are received in time, with most postal systems requiring such letters be mailed somewhere in the ballpark of by December 10th, give or take a few days.

Going back to the United States’ Operation Santa, this has evolved over more modern decades and in the last couple years has gone digital, with it being exceptionally easy for anyone to sign up and become one of Santa’s helpers in adopting one or more letters to fulfill.

The exact process here is this. First, if you would just like Santa to reply with a letter with no gifts, you simply mail your kids’ letters to something like Santa Claus, North Pole, including postage like you would on any other letter you mail. If you would like the response sent back to be postmarked from the North Pole, you may also mail the letter to The North Pole Postmark, Postmaster 4141 Postmark Dr, Anchorage AK 99530-9998. If you want, you can also include a response letter in a self addressed and stamped envelope, which will then, in this case, be postmarked from the North Pole and sent back to you.

However, if you’re a parent who really needs to make sure Santa hits your house on Christmas, you can instead address your kids’ letter to Santa Claus, 123 Elf Road, North Pole, 88888. They also recommend making sure to put all your kids’ letters into one envelope so if the letter gets accepted by one of Santa’s helpers every kid in the house gets a response. Further, they strongly recommend you include a letter from you, the parent, describing your family’s situation in detail and what you could use some help with and why, as well as the names and ages of your children, any relevant clothing and shoe sizes, etc. All of this significantly increases the odds of your kids’ letters getting fulfilled, at least in part. One thing that will not increase your odds is mailing many such letters from the same household as their system will pick up on this fact and reject multiples.

From there, these letters are processed via scanning and redacting any and all identifying information. They are then placed in a database accessible online, where Santa’s helpers can go to access them and see if there are any letters they might like to volunteer to take care of on some level, with each helper able to take up to 15 such letters if they so choose. The helpers are also free to fulfill the requests in whatever way they please. On that note, once the helper opts into accepting handling of the letter, they then can purchase and mail up to six packages to the child’s home via U.S. Priority Mail.

You might at this point wonder how Santa’s helpers can mail to some anonymous family out there? Well, once you accept a letter to Santa, you are sent a QR code which the USPS’s system uses to know what address to ultimately deliver the packages to without anyone but the postal service knowing where it’s going. Noteworthy here, it is also completely anonymous on the sender’s side as well. You are, after all, Santa’s helper, so the gift ultimately came from Santa in the system.

In this way, tens of thousands of children each year in the U.S. who write to Santa directly receive their gifts from Santa via USPS and Santa’s helpers.

As for what happens to the letters after all this processing, they are simply destroyed the same as any other letters where the recipient is outside of the coverage area of any world postal system.

Bonus Fact:

Arguably one of the most famous editorials ever written (still the record holder for the most reprinted English newspaper editorial of all time) was published on September 21, 1897 in the New York Sun. It didn’t address matters of importance in the city, in the country, or even in the world at large. So what was it about? In September of 1897, a little girl named Virginia O’Hanlon was deeply troubled. Some of her school friends insisted that Santa Claus didn’t exist. When she went to her father, Dr. Philip F. O’Hanlon, with her concerns he suggested she write to the Sun, as the family often did.

So she wrote a letter, determined to find out the truth.

“Dear Editor—

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon”

This letter ended up on the desk of veteran Sun writer Francis P. Church, who had worked for the paper for over twenty years. Allegedly Church “bristled and pooh-poohed” when his editor handed him Virginia’s letter asking him to compose a reply. And yet, he produced a masterpiece that became a beloved holiday touchstone – by his deadline and in under 500 words.

The editorial, which was eventually republished in 20 different languages, certainly hit home with young Virginia and her parents. Virginia recalled during a 1914 interview that,

“It used to make me as proud as a peacock to go along in the street in the neighborhood and hear somebody say, ‘Oh, look. There’s Virginia O’Hanlon. Did you see that editorial the New York Sun had about her?’ And father and mother were even prouder than I, I think. They still show the editorial to callers and just talk people’s arms off about it.”

The editorial’s message still resonates just as strongly over a century later:

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.

We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”