HOLIDAYS

MSNBC - According to a 2023 Christmas report from The Associated Press, almost half the U.S. (47% of us to be exact) had at least one unspent voucher or gift card, and the unspent money on those cards was believed to total $23 billion. That’s enough to buy each of the 334.9 million people in the U.S. a Secret Santa gift that costs $68.67. 

Smithsonian Magazine -  Writing a letter to Santa Claus has been a deep-rooted tradition in the U.S. So, where do letters to Santa go? Prior to the establishment of the Postal Service in 1775, American children would burn their missives to Santa, believing that the ashes would rise up and reach him, Nancy Pope, longtime curator of postal history at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., told Smithsonian magazine in 2017. (Pope, founding historian at the museum, died in 2019 at age 62.)

Today, despite the advent of more modern communications like email and texting, hundreds of thousands of children, from all over the globe, continue to send their Christmas wish lists to Santa using old-fashioned snail mail. And incredibly, many of those letters are actually answered.

To deal with the annual deluge, the Postal Service—Santa’s primary ghostwriter (aside from parents)—created Operation Santa in the early 20th century. In 2017, the service made it possible for kids to write to Santa online, at least in New York City. And now, everyone can.

Operation Santa was in full swing around 1912, and in 1914, the postmaster in Santa Claus, Indiana, also began answering letters from children, Emily Thompson, who served until 2018 as executive director of the town’s nonprofit Santa Claus Museum & Village, told Smithsonian in 2017. The museum answers letters sent to the town, as well as those from the area that are addressed to Santa or the North Pole.

The digital age has not put a damper on first-class mail received by the museum. “Our letter volume has increased over the years,” said Thompson.