sledge Greetings all and Happy July 24th to you! Christmas Eve is just five months away.

That means just one thing up here at the North Pole: elves from everywhere will start returning to the North Pole from their annual training trips and conventions. As we told you last month Santa has special training workshops for elves in different places around the world. Starting next week, they return home to the North Pole to get down to work. There will be a lot more people in the lunch room to talk to next week and I cannot wait to hear their stories.

We have been celebrating Christmas in July here at the North Pole and that will continue through this weekend. We will be taking questions from around the world and we have even set up chat times with Santa for the weekend of July 27th and July 28th. This is a pretty rare opportunity because Santa is usually too busy for this kind of thing.

Santa and Mrs. Claus are taking a little break this weekend and will be on the beach somewhere warm, they tell me. (Santa won’t say where). But he says he can take some time out to talk to the kids online this week.

From the mailbag come this question from four year old Stephanie of Ocala, Florida, USA: Can I fly on Santa’s sleigh this year?

This is a very popular question, one Santa gets asked a lot. Santa would love to have the time to take every kid for a little ride on his sleigh. Christmas Eve is especially a rough night to ask for this to happen because Santa is, well, a little busy. But Santa sure loves the idea of taking kids for rides on his sleigh. He’d love to do it. But there’s just one little problem.

Remember kids: Santa cannot do anything without your Mother’s permission. And he is yet to meet a mother that will let her kid go on the sleigh. After all, the sleigh travels very fast in air that is very cold and it has no roof, no windows, no doors and, more importantly, no seat belts. Most Moms won’t let their kids near Santa’s sleigh.

Make sure you ask Mom before you ask Santa when you see him.

— Elf Ernest