Canadian Postal Codes - Santa Claus

Santa Claus

In 1974, staff at Canada Post's Montreal office were noticing a considerable number of letters addressed to Santa Claus coming into the postal system, and those letters were being treated as undeliverable. Since those employees did not want the writers, mostly young children, to be disappointed at the lack of response, they started answering the letters themselves. The amount of mail sent to Santa Claus increased every Christmas, up to the point that Canada Post decided to start an official Santa Claus letter-response program in 1983. Approximately one million letters come in to Santa Claus each Christmas, including from outside of Canada, and all of them are answered in the same languages in which they are written. Canada Post introduced a special address for mail to Santa Claus, complete with its own postal code:

SANTA CLAUS

NORTH POLE H0H 0H0

CANADA

In French, Santa's name Père Noël translates as "Father Christmas", addressed as:

PÈRE NOËL

PÔLE NORD H0H 0H0

CANADA

H0H 0H0 was chosen for this special seasonal use as it reads as "Ho ho ho".

The H0- prefix is a contradiction: the 0 indicates a very small, rural village, but H is used to designate Montreal, the second-largest city in Canada. As such, the H0- prefix is almost completely empty, with one exception: H0M, assigned to the international Akwesasne tribal reserve on the U.S.-Canada border, is the only other H0- postal code in active use.