How is the North Pole Post Office Organized?
Dear Ernest,
How is the North Pole post office organized?
Emily
London, England
Emily,
I asked Elf Hugo to explain the answer to this question, since he’s in charge over there at the North Pole post office.
Elf Hugo says the mail comes in three ways: through the postal systems of each country, through stocking mail and by the Internet. So the mail is first sorted through different parts of the North Pole Post Office.
A lot of kids write letters or send drawings to Santa. These get opened and sorted according to what time they come in, what country they come from and finally from what house they come from. They are given to Santa each day. Santa has an elf assistant who reads mail to him that he cannot personally look at. Many times, especially when Santa is on the sleigh, he will have mail read to him and sometimes he has the elf assistant write a response.
Stocking mail kind of works the same way but it is different in one important respect: stocking mail is when you put a letter or a note or a drawing into your own stocking and it gets picked up by a mail courier elf. Like other letters it gets sorted. But stocking mail usually comes in a lot really close to Christmas, when it is too late to send it any other way. This tends to be urgent stuff. So this stuff gets expressed to Santa right away.
Internet mail is growing more and more all the time. We have elves who work at computers night and day to check out the mail and decide how to best get it in front of Santa. Sometimes they put it into a “queue” that downloads to Santa’s sleigh where he reads it on the heads-up display. Some times he reads it on his cell phone. Some times it goes to an elf assistant to read to him off of a tablet computer. But he sees it all.
It takes hundreds of elves to keep all of this organized.
