If you address a letter to Santa, chances are the letter arrives in a tiny town of Santa Claus, Alaska. This is the story of a family who somewhat by accident became associated with Christmas and the destination of piles of mail each holiday season.
Paul Brown is general manager of Santa Claus House in North Pole, Alaska. The red-and-white house near Fairbanks is a family-run business conceived by Brown’s wife’s grandparents in the 1950s and continues today as a popular tourist attraction.
“Con and Ellie Miller, who are the founders of Santa Claus House, arrived in Alaska actually in 1949, shortly after World War II,” Brown says. “Con was looking for adventure. They moved up here on a whim.”
First the couple opened up a clothing store in the Fairbanks area. The store didn’t stick, so Con became a merchant and fur buyer, traveling to surrounding villages, many of which were off the road system.
“One day Con found an old Santa suit and decided to dress up as Santa Claus when he was traveling to the villages,” Brown says. “He was the first Santa Claus a lot of the village children in Alaska had ever seen. So, he kind of got the reputation as being Santa Claus.”
The Millers decided to build a trading post in the nearby village, which was the beginning of the Santa Clause House. The house actually was built before the town became known as North Pole.
“Legend is one of the reasons it was called North Pole is it was consistently colder than anywhere else in the interior,” Brown says. “If you look at weather data, we’re usually 7 to 10 degrees colder than even Fairbanks, which is only 15 miles away. So, the North Pole name kind of stuck.”
Letters To and From Santa
For more than 70 years, the family business has offered official letters from Santa. According to the company’s website: “These personalized letters are filled with more than good wishes from Saint Nick; they’re filled with the promise of Christmas, and all its secrets and magic. And a Santa letter can set many a worried mind at ease, as each reader learns that he or she is, indeed, on Santa’s “good” list! It may sound insignificant to adult ears, but think back: To a child, knowing he or she has the approval of “the Big Guy” can do amazing things for self-esteem and confidence!”
“We have been doing the letters since the 1950s,” Brown says. “So generations of families have received these letters and we’re very careful to keep it similar so when a granddaughter, a grandchild or grandson or whoever receives a letter they can look at and say this is the same letter that my parents received or my grandparents received 50, 40, 50 or 60 years ago.”
Letters from North Pole, Alaska, have been sent to nearly every country in the world. The town is also on the receiving end of many letters.
“A lot of people wonder what happens to the letters kids write that they address ‘Santa Claus, North Pole,’” Brown says. “A big chunk of those, 400,000 to 500,000, end up here in our tiny town, with a population of 2,200 people. We get a lot of them here at the store. That’s quite a burden on the postal service here.”
While Santa can’t respond to every one of those letters, Brown says, the Big Guy will read every single one.
In the second part of this episode of Farming the Countryside, Andrew McCrea takes you to the northernmost town in the U.S.: Barrow, Alaska. The sun didn’t rise in Barrow, Alaska on Nov. 20. After that date. Each year they won’t see it again for over two months. It’s just part of life in a town on Alaska’s arctic coast place where the locals feel as if they’ll sweat to death if the forecast were to hit the upper 60s.
