Advent Blog Day 11: Greetings From the North Pole

When I had my column, at Christmas time I would have a special guest to write my column instead. Here is one of the columns she wrote back in 2004. *****

Greetings from the North Pole,

It’s been awhile since I’ve written, a couple of years in fact. It just gets so busy around here.

As some of you know, I’m the one in charge of Santa’s mail. I wish I could answer each of your dear letters individually, but it’s impossible. I had thought of setting up a mail answering group, but we really do need to have all the elves working on the toys and taking care of North Pole city. So we just have a small group of elves opening the letters and keeping track of who wants what.

In your letters you often have questions that I thought I would answer. Of course I can’t answer every question, but I’ve picked out a few that seem to be the most popular.

Q: Do you have any children?

A: For some reason this seems to be a very popular question. The answer is, no, my dears, Santa and I have no children. We love children and wished we had some but it didn’t happen for us. Besides if we had had children, they would have turned into teenagers with bad attitudes and then men and women in business suits, and they would have stopped believing in Santa Claus and it’s not a good thing to have your own children not believe in you.

However we do have plenty of elves and their children and when they’re not working they are pretty mischievous and no matter how many hundreds of years they get they never do grow up. Sigh. Sometimes I wish they would.

Q: How does Santa fly around the world in just one night and visit all the children in the world?

A: Well dears, you have to remember that the earth revolves and there is actually twenty four hours in one night. Santa doesn’t visit every child because many children don’t celebrate Christmas. And then of course children stop believing in Santa so he doesn’t visit those ones either. You see Santa can only come to homes where at least one person believes.

The reindeer and Santa are so swift that you can’t even see them. If you had a machine that could slow down time, you would be able to see him in your living room putting presents under the tree, but because that hasn’t been invented yet, you simply can’t see how fast he moves. One minute there’s nothing from Santa under your tree, and in the next moment (between blinks of your eyes) there is. As well, the reindeer are as fast as Santa.

Q: The other day I went and saw Santa at a mall, and then when my Mom took me to another mall, Santa was there too. And when I talk to my friends they all say they saw Santa at different places. How can Santa be at all those places at the same time?

A: To tell the truth, you most likely saw one of Santa’s helpers. Here at the North Pole we have a Santa school, and jolly old men from all over the world come and learn how to be Santa. If you meet a bad looking Santa he didn’t come from our school. There are a lot of Santa’s out there who don’t bother coming here to learn. We don’t quite know how to stop this and it gets Santa pretty upset to see unauthorized Santa’s pretending to be him. It’s not as if we can go to court and take out a copy write or something. He doesn’t mind so much if the Santa’s are good at being him; it’s the ones who are bad at it that upset him. Think how you would feel if someone pretended to be you and they did a bad job of it.

But there are a lot of really good Santas, and if you find a good Santa he most likely came out of our school. Good Santa’s report back to us about what you little boys and girls want. As well, Santa loves to come visit malls and other places, so you just might find yourself sitting on the knee of the real Santa.

Q: Does Rudolph lead the sleigh every year or just when the weather is bad?

A: Actually we have many, many reindeer that pull Santa’s sleigh. You only know about a few of them. The poor deer get tired out going so fast so we set up stations throughout the world. Several days before Christmas Eve the deer fly to these different stations and rest up. Then when the sleigh comes they switch over with the other deer, so Santa always has fresh deer to pull the sleigh. Rudolph is stationed where we know the weather is going to be bad. So yes, Rudolph comes every year, he just may not come to your house every year. Also Rudolph has some children who also have his bright red nose, and they help out where there’s bad weather too.

Oops, I’ve just checked my word count (it’s a button on the top of the word document if you write on a computer) and I see I’ve reached my limit. I’m only supposed to write so many words. So until next year my dears, or whenever I can hide away from the elves, (if you think children take up a lot of your time, try having elves) I bid you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Love

Mrs. Claus

P.S. Stop worrying about Santa’s cholesterol and his being overweight. He really is very healthy, doesn’t smoke (so if you see pictures with him smoking a pipe that’s very wrong), and he exercises. I tried a diet on him once and it made him very sick.