{"id":5801,"date":"2011-12-08T00:01:17","date_gmt":"2011-12-08T00:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/?p=5801"},"modified":"2013-04-09T14:27:30","modified_gmt":"2013-04-09T13:27:30","slug":"santa-claus-has-his-own-postal-code-in-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/2011\/12\/08\/santa-claus-has-his-own-postal-code-in-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"Santa Claus has his own postal code in Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/h3>\n

The most popular guy on earth<\/h3>\n

Every year across the world millions of letters are sent to Santa Claus containing children’s best wishes and good will to the man that supplies more presents than anyone else on the planet. This is such a phenomenon that some post offices started, years ago, to take the issue seriously.<\/p>\n

In New Yorka project called\u00a0Operation Santa Claus<\/a> started in the ’20s. The project began informally whenNew York postal clerks began chipping in their own money to buy gifts for poor kids whose notes to Santa ended up in the dead-letter office. As the number of letters grew, the clerks asked for help from the public. The program\u2019s most dramatic growth has come in the last two decades. In 1980, there were about 5,000 letters to Santa from needy kids received at the New York Post Office. This year the total will almost certainly be more than 150,000, and could approach 200,000.<\/p>\n

Santa’s parcel business<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the Artic Circle (Finland), where Santa has his permanent residence, there is the Santa Claus main post office<\/a>. The service is provided by the Finnish postal service Posti. Cards, letters and parcels sent from Santa Claus\u2019 Main Post Office are franked with a genuineArctic Circle special postmark, which is something users can\u2019t get anywhere else.\u00a0The office gets around 700,000 letters a year! And now there is an email service where users can send their emails and save the paper work.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Some decades later up in the North, staff at Canada Post’s\u00a0Montreal\u00a0office were noticing a considerable number of letters addressed to\u00a0Santa Claus\u00a0coming into the postalsystem, 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.\u00a0The amount of mail sent to Santa Claus increased every\u00a0Christmas, 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 ofCanada, and all of them are answered, in the same languages in which they are written.\u00a0Canada Post introduced a special address for mail to Santa Claus, complete with its own postal code:<\/p>\n

SANTA CLAUS,\u00a0<\/tt>NORTH POLE \u00a0H0H 0H0,\u00a0<\/span>CANADA<\/span><\/p>\n

H0H 0H0 was chosen for this special seasonal use as it reads as “Ho ho ho”. In fact the H0- prefix is a contradiction because in Canada the 0 indicates a very small, rural village, but H is used to designate\u00a0Montreal, the second-largest city inCanada. As such, the H0- prefix is almost completely empty, with one exception: H0M, assigned to the international\u00a0Akwesasne\u00a0tribal reserve on the U.S.-Canada border, is the only other H0- postal code in active use.<\/p>\n

This is a non profit explanation<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every year across the world millions of letters are sent to Santa Claus containing children’s best wishes and good will to the man that supplies more presents than anyone else on the planet. Aware of this many postal offices have created special services to collect and reply all the letters, but in Canada they went even further: they created Santa Claus postal code.
CONTINUE READING<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[176,111],"tags":[2947,2948,2949,2950,2951],"class_list":["post-5801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-north-america","category-society","tag-santa-claus","tag-santa-claus-letters","tag-santa-claus-post-office","tag-santa-claus-postal-code","tag-santa-claus-postal-code-in-canada"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/0624canada-post.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5801"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5804,"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5801\/revisions\/5804"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitedexplanations.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}