You cannot view this content because:
- By subscribing, you have opted out of cookies related to third-party content. You will therefore not be able to play our videos, which require third-party cookies to function.
- You are using an ad blocker. We recommend you disable it to access our videos.
If neither of these two cases apply to you, contact us at [email protected].
CHRISTMAS – “Dear Santa Claus,” is how most letters to the giant with the white beard begin. Whether to “Lapland”, to the “Land of the Reindeer” or to “Santa Claus’ Igloo” – more than 16,000 letters destined for Santa Claus are received by the Swedish Post every year. And as you can see in the video at the top of the article, Local elves don't respond easily to them. For more than a century they have been selecting the extraordinary in order to archive it.
Today, the Postnord Museum houses a collection of around 10,000 letters from all over the world, the oldest of which dates from 1897. “These come from the United States, Asia and I come from Taiwan,” says Kristina Olofsdotter, head of stamps at PostNord, explains AFP from the Postal Museum in Stockholm.
A gift list that has changed a lot
Games, pets and books have always been at the top of children's wishes, although earlier children may have had more modest expectations. Among the letters that Kristina Olofsdotter reveals, we find a box from the 1960s and 70s: “Dear Santa Claus, I was a good girl. Can you send me a doll and some candy? Thank you, Gillian from Glasgow,” the manager reads aloud
A very different request than the one Postnord is receiving now, like this letter he received this year from a certain little Melvin asking Santa for a deck of Pokemon cards, Pokemon fighting figures, a skateboard and walkie-talkies. “You can see that in the old letters the children may have asked one or two things. Now their lists are longer,” says Kristina Olofsdotter.
But the ones that particularly marked her were those she received during the Covid-19 pandemic: “The children wrote to Santa Claus to stop the disease, many sent letters for this.” It was a great strength of all of these Children who wrote to Santa Claus. It really stuck with me,” she says.
See also on HuffPost:
You cannot view this content because:
- By subscribing, you have opted out of cookies related to third-party content. You will therefore not be able to play our videos, which require third-party cookies to function.
- You are using an ad blocker. We recommend you disable it to access our videos.
If neither of these two cases apply to you, contact us at [email protected].