Greetings Everyone!

The signs of it changing from Thanksgiving to Christmas are complete: the North Pole Post Office is swamped.

Santa is getting letters and wishlists and mail from all over. He always does but still it is suprising to see how much of it comes in every day. They come to the North Pole by sleigh. There are hundreds of elves working in the Post Office and sort through them all. They organize the mail for Santa first by country, then by province or state, then by City and then by letter writer. Santa sees them all.

But the work that goes into all this is tremendous.

I talked to Elf Hugo the other day. We were going to interview him on the radio but since he has a little cold and felt that he sounded funny we backed off from that. He’ll be on the radio later.

Anyway, I asked Hugo if the post office was busier than they expected and he said “yes”. The post office, like Santa’s Workshop, has been expanded and improved in recent years. A great many more elves work there than worked there in the past. But even with all that Hugo is worried that they can handle all the mail.

“It is early,” Hugo explained. “With Christmas more a month away the letters are long. And this is when everyone writes in to Santa. So the mail is big, a lot to handle. As we get closer to Christmas even more mail comes in but it is shorter — you know, kids writing in to say they forgot to add this or that. So the mail is different than at other times.”

The North Pole Post Office is sure a sight to see. One of the many things that is different are the number of computer workstations. There must be 5000 computers in there. Elves there all processing things for Santa, getting messages tagged right so he can see them when he needs to see them. A couple of decades ago there were no computers there. Folks these days send Santa a lot of mail by way of the computers and phones.

While they are busy Elf Hugo says they are NOT behind. They are just working very hard.