Santa Claus Lives In Canada

Officially, according to international law, no nation owns territorial rights over the North Pole. So shouldn't that mean that Santa Claus is a resident of no country? A citizen of the whole world, as it were?

Sort of. Five nations have borders that overlap the Arctic Circle, and thus occasionally, unofficially, try to stake claim to the North Pole (especially the potentially resource-rich seabed beneath). All five of them also claim to have direct lines to Santa, but one of them is obviously trying way harder than the others.

In Denmark and Norway, kids send their letters for Santa to Copenhagen and Oslo, respectively, where helpful postal workers "pass on" the mail to the Big Man up North, and he sometimes sends personalized replies. In Russia, the government encourages kids to use standardized templates for their letters and not to include personalized information like their age, address and school to avoid their identities being stolen (because Russia).

In the United States, kids only get replies from Santa if they send their letters along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope... and also include's Santa's reply, hand-written by their parents. I swear, that's seriously how they do it. At least they mail them to the post office in Anchorage, Alaska, which I guess is sorta close to the North Pole.

You know. Relatively speaking.

But in Canada, we do it right. Kids in Canada (and technically from around the world) can write letters to Santa Claus at:

Santa Claus
North Pole H0H 0H0
Canada

That's it. No weird PO boxes or redirects to post-offices in the capital city. Santa Claus has his very own, custom postal code ("Ho, Ho, Ho," get it?) You don't even need to add a stamp; it will get delivered if you just put a glow-in-the dark Minions sticker on the corner instead. And the best part? He always sends back a personalized letter in return.

Since 1981, Canada Post has run a program where hundreds of volunteers open, read and respond to children's letters to Santa received from around the country and the world. In 2017 alone, over 1.6 million letters were answered, requiring over 200,000 volunteer hours to accomplish. Even the Amazon warehouse can't process orders that efficiently, and they pay their employees! (well, sort of)

Even this year, when a postal workers labour strike delayed some mail delivery, the program continued and the post office urged kids to keep writing their letters (they just had to make the deadline to get them in a little earlier). I know some people grumble at postal workers, but I can't find fault with anyone who devotes so much time and energy to making little kids happy.

I think the strike had something to do with them forcing everyone to wear these dumb hats.

Sure, lots of places lay claim to being the home of Santa Claus. The real Saint Nicholas lived and died in 4th-century Turkey. The cities of Bari and Venice in Italy both claim to house the bones of St. Nick, stolen from their resting place during the Crusades. Somehow this makes them a tourist attraction, though I don't know how you explain the grave-robbing part to kids. A tiny village in Alaska, which changed it's name to "North Pole," has a pretty good gig going, though I doubt the real Santa has a 50-foot tall statue of himself in his front yard.

I also suspect there's significantly less barbed-wire at the real North Pole.

The province of Lapland in Finland has long been rumoured to be the home of Father Christmas (though other Scandinavians vehemently disagree). When Eleanor Roosevelt visited the city of   Rovaniemi, Lapland during a 1950 post-war reconstruction tour, she insisted on meeting Santa Claus, so the locals quickly built a cabin and told her it belonged to him. The First-Lady was apparently satisfied, and I can't figure out if the Finns were making fun of her or not. They did, however, turn that hastily-built cabin into a massive theme park that now sees 500,000 visitors a year, which is further proof that Europeans are good at suckering Americans.

But for all the claims, I think the best one is clearly with Canada. We have a legitimate postal code for Kris Kringle, and he always finds a way to write you back. The North Pole obviously has a red and white maple leaf flag flying over it.

Just don't tell the United Nations about it.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Alert, Nunavut - Santa Claus's Next-door Neighbour

Alert is the northernmost permanently-inhabited location on Earth. It is just 800km (500 miles) from the North Pole. It is so far North that temperatures only increase above freezing for two months out of the year (and not by much - average August high is just 3 degrees Celsius or 39 degrees Fahrenheit).

Why do people live and work next door to Santa Claus? For both scientific and sovereignty reasons. Alert is a research station and military outpost, maintained and operated year-round by the Canadian government. There's lots of scientific information to be gleaned by poking at frozen oceans, and we constantly have to be watching for those pesky Russians to be sneaking into our hemisphere across the North Pole. This is actually a legitimate concern: the waters of the Arctic are contested by Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark and the US - or more importantly, the natural resources that potentially lie beneath the seabed under the waters are contested. Yes, we are so close to scouring our planet clean of gas and oil that we're looking to start drilling in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer's back yard.

Environment Canada air chemistry observatory. Yup, scientists sit around in the arctic in the dark for months at a time observing the air. 

Stay in school, kids!

How far north is Alert, exactly? I have an anecdote to illustrate.

I work for a department that provides satellite communications services to the Canadian Government. Due to the vast size of the country, with communities located in very remote locations where no other form of communication is available, our satellite phones and modems are used regularly by police services, park rangers, medical personnel, search & rescue operations and the military.

Recently we had a meeting with a new satellite provider based out of the United States who was trying to sell us on their new devices and equipment. His products were interesting and he had a great sales pitch, but inevitably it came down to one question: "How far north does your satellite network reach?"

"Oh, it goes really far," he assured us. "You shouldn't have a problem," he said. We pointed out that we have a number of communities and organizations well above the 60th parallel. His confidence wavered a little there, but he still insisted that it should work "most of the time." Then we showed him a map of the Northwest Territories and Nunvat, and pointed out communities such as Iqaluit and Resolute, and research stations such as Eureka and Alert. He was gobsmacked. "You go that far north? Nothing goes that far north."

You know nothing, American satellite provider.

Canada is vast, far larger than most people realize, especially along the North/South axis. Alert is basically the farthest point North, and is 4,358km (over 2,700 miles) from Toronto. That's about twice the distance from Toronto to Austin, Texas, which itself is no small trip. Hell, the distance from Alert to Toronto is only slightly less than the distance from New York City to London, England. That's big, and that's really, really far North.

We had to invent a new unit of measurement called "really stupid far."

The station is named after the HMS Alert, a British/Canadian exploration sloop that wintered in the area in 1875-76. Yes, that kind of sloop. A wooden sailing ship, stuck in the ice in -50 below weather. For months. Between this and the Cremation of Sam McGee, it really seems like folks loved to die in the Arctic back in the 1800s. Oh well, I guess they didn't have Twitter.

Seriously, who do you have to piss off to get assigned to this job?

Not surprisingly, there have been a few tragedies around the station since it was established in 1950. The most famous of which was the crash of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules (a heavy duty military transport plane) in 1991 that killed 5 people and left the survivors stranded for 32 hours while search and rescue teams fought blizzard conditions to reach them. If that sounds like a movie it's because it is - it was dramatized in the made-for-TV-film "Ordeal in the Arctic" in 1993, starring Richard Chamberlain. Reviews were chilly. 

Sorry.

Happy Turkey Murder Day, My Fellow Canadians!

This is going to sound like a bad 90s stand-up routine, but what's up with Canadian Thanksgiving anyway? In the US, Thanksgiving is a huge event, celebrated by massive football games (which are seemingly equivalent in pomp and circumstance to the overthrow of oppressive regimes in other countries) and murdering fellow citizens in cattle-like stampedes over cheap electronics. In Canada we have some turkey, maybe a pumpkin pie. In election years, we'll passive-aggressively talk about politics. But it's really not a big deal. In Quebec they take the day off and go to the spa. In several other provinces it's not even recognized as a statutory holiday.

A quick bit of research (thanks, Wikipedia!) uncovers that Canadian Thanksgiving is actually older than its American cousin. The first recorded instance of "giving thanks" on Canadian shores took place all the way back in 1578 (compared to the Pilgrims OG version in 1621) when English explorer Sir Martin Frobisher attempted to set up a colony on Baffin Island in what is now known as the Canadian territory of Nunavut whilst searching for the ever-elusive Northern Passage to the Pacific. 

Now, those of you who know a little of Canadian geography know that Nunavut is among the most inhospitable places on Earth, so setting up a colony there was about as successful as trying to attack Russia in winter.

That collar was probably cutting off blood flow to his brain.

Just trying to make landfall, Frobisher lost several ships along with their crews and provisions, but eventually the fleet made it and started kissing the frozen dirt. Mayster Wolfall (no he's not a Game of Thrones character, he was the fleet's preacher) then "...made unto them a godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be thankefull to God for their strange and miraculous deliverance in those so dangerous places ..." which in my opinion was not really a Thanksgiving Feast so much as a JESUS-CHRIST-THANK-GOD-WE'RE-ALIVE- FROBISHER-YOU'RE-AN-IDIOT cocktail party. But whatever the details (or how many slaps Frobisher received upside the head), this pants-wetting-landing in frozen tundra is what went down in the history books as the first Thanksgiving.

In case you're wondering what happened to Frobisher, over two voyages to the New World he lost several more ships but ended up bringing back to England a combined total of over 1500 tons of what he thought was gold ore. It turned out to be nothing but worthless pyrite. Fed up with exploration (and probably - rightfully - mocked by his peers) Frobisher took up a life of privateering in the name of England. Turns out he was way better at murdering Spaniards, as he ended up being knighted for his efforts.

Thanksgiving was celebrated irregularly for the next few hundred years, usually when there was a particularly good harvest or some other special event to celebrate - it was the same in the US. Thanksgiving didn't become an "official" regularly scheduled holiday until the modern era. The biggest Thanksgiving influence the US passed onto Canada was after the American Revolution, when those still loyal to Britain realized sticking around all those gun-loving Yanks was probably a bad idea and fled North. They brought with them their traditions of turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing and taking advantage of the indigenous population. Just kidding! Americans had actually learned that from the Canadians and the British first.

So you're going to give us this life-saving food in exchange for a few worthless beads?
Can we talk about real estate next?

After World War II, Thanksgiving got lumped in with Armistice Day (November 11, now Remembrance Day in Canada) and remained there for a few decades until someone decided that we needed a holiday in both November AND October. It was John Diefenbaker, the only Conservative Canadian Prime Minister to serve between 1930 and 1980, who made that call.

It might just be a coincidence, but during the Dief's term as PM, he also appointed the first Aboriginal Senator and First Nations people were given the right to vote. Conservatives seem to be a lot more chill back then.

In 1957 Thanksgiving officially became the second Monday in October, and it's remained that way ever since.

So as you enjoy your turkey this afternoon, argue about politics and pray for a Blue Jays victory tonight, please remember Frobisher and Diefenbaker in your revelries, because without them Thanksgiving might be a completely different holiday. Maybe it would be in November like the in the States and be a even bigger deal. Just saying.

Did you know I've written a couple of books? They have nothing to do with Thanksgiving, but they are set in Canada... mostly. The first, Ten Thousand Days is now available at Amazon and many other booksellers worldwide. The second, Hell Comes to Hogtown, has greatly upped Canadian content in hopes of getting some kind of Government grant.