Finland - Postcards from Santa's hometown

Location: Santa's Main Post Office, Santa Clause Village, 
                 8km northeast of Rovaniemi, Finland
Date: 4 Sept 2018

At this time of the year, the most fun thing to do is to visit Santa's Main Post Office...

... where the front desk are manned by cheerful Santa's helpers. 

It feels like Christmas 365 days a year here. Just like other post offices, you can find stamps, postcards, envelopes etc here. However, Santa's post office has something extra that you don't find elsewhere:

Santa has so far received about 18 million letters from 199 different countries. At Christmas time, Santa can get about 32,000 letters a day. The letters received by Santa are kept here at the post office.

Top countries that have sent out letters to Santa are China, Poland, Italy, United Kingdom, Japan, Finland and Russia. At Christmas of 2017, Santa received around 500,000 letters. The white scroll in the clear box is a letter sent by 2,110 children from 8 different schools in Brasov, Romania. The length of the letter is 413.8m. 

Inside the letters, there are also gifts for the elves and reindeers with the reindeers often receiving carrots. Baby elves and baby reindeer receive dummies / pacifiers from children that are old enough to give them for re-using.

Taking some time to write a couple of postcards.

There are two post boxes at Santa's post office. One is the normal one that will be mailed out immediately. The second more fascinating one is this particular post box that collects the postcards and letters to be delivered only at Christmas time. So, you can be here anytime of the year and still have your postcard delivered specially for Christmas.

Each item mailed out of Santa's post office has a special postmark and stamp. The Arctic Circle postmark stamp is only available in the Arctic Circle. We bought the visitation day cover as a souvenir to remember our fun visit to Santa's Post Office.