Holiday Cheer!

Something amusing I found on the Wiki regarding Santa Claus and the mail he receives via the Canadian Postal Service. Anyone else think it's awesome?

Santa Claus

In 1974, staff at Canada Post's Montreal office were noticing a considerable amount 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 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".

As the H0- prefix would normally signify a rural area in Montreal, this portion of the postal code allocation is otherwise relatively empty. H0M, assigned to the Akwesane
Indian reserve, is the only other H0- postal code in active use.