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The History of Santa in Canada

Today over 11,000 volunteers respond to Santa Letters from Canada Post and recieve over a million letters from children all over the world.  But how did it start? (click on the headings to open the websites in a new window)

Canada Post Email

In 1974, staff at Canada Post’s Montreal office were noticing a considerable number of letters addressed to Santa Claus coming into the postal system, and those letters were being treated as undeliverable. Since those employees did not want the writers, mostly young children, to be disappointed at the lack of response, they started answering the letters themselves.

The amount of mail sent to Santa Claus increased every Christmas, up to the point that Canada Post decided to start an official Santa Claus letter-response program in 1983. Approximately one million letters come in to Santa Claus each Christmas, including from outside of Canada, and all of them are answered, in the same languages in which they are written. Canada Post introduced a special address for mail to Santa Claus, complete with its own postal code:

SANTA CLAUS

NORTH POLE  H0H 0H0

CANADA

Source: Wikipedia

Norad Tracks Santa

In 1955, a Sears Roebuck store in Colorado Springs,Colorado, gave children a number to call a “Santa hotline”. The number was mistyped and children called theContinental Air Defense Command (CONAD) on Christmas Eve instead. The Director of Operations, Col. Harry Shoup, received the first call for Santa and responded by telling children that there were signs on the radar that Santa was indeed heading south from North Pole. In 1958, Canada and the United States jointly created the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and together tracked Santa Claus for children of North America that year and ever since. This tracking can now be done via theInternet and NORAD’s website.

Source: Wikipedia

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