With Santa just hours away from starting off on his sleigh, a little known fact is that the massive toy organizational effort begins in post offices just like the one in Terrace.
That’s because Canada Post employees do double duty as postal elves at Christmas time to ensure Santa receives letters from children.
Those same postal elves then carefully collect the letters Santa sends back for safe delivery.
“Canada Post has 9,000 volunteers across Canada helping Santa,” explains Eugene Knapick from Canada Post. “They assist in 30 languages and also in Braille.”
Knapick estimated the volunteers helped Santa process more than a million letters this year.
“Since 1982 the North Pole with that postal code of H0H H0H has received 21.8 million letters.”
And while letters to Santa do not need postage, they do need a return address.
“Santa has some powers, but he doesn’t the powers to predict where every letter comes from so he needs to know to whom he should respond,” said Knapick.
All of those letters to Santa, as well as the volume of other mail this time of year, has Canada Post extremely busy. And that’s why, said Knapick, people would have seen postal vans out about the past several Sundays.
Parcel volumes increased this year over last Christmas, said Knapick.