Santa is sorry, but the elf post is down

Children who write to Father Christmas in Greenland rather than Finland may find that their letters go unanswered in future now that state subsidies to the elves have been withdrawn and their cash reserves are running low.

Boys and girls all over the world have a choice of two addresses to which they can send letters to Father Christmas and be confident of receiving a reply. Both Father Christmas of Nuuk, Greenland, and Father Christmas of Rovaniemi, Lapland, claim to reside in Santa’s official grotto and have paid helpers to write back to children.



However, while Father Christmas in Lapland benefits from generous public handouts and received a postbag of nearly 500,000 letters last year, Father Christmas in Greenland has fallen on hard times. The government of the former Danish colony will no longer pay for him to reply to his comparatively modest 50,000 letters a year and he has been hit by a cash flow problem which is thoroughly out of keeping with Christmas tradition.

Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, has laid claim to be Father Christmas’s true headquarters ever since Donald Duck visited the town with his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie to see Santa in a Walt Disney cartoon film in 1934.

An anonymous commercial benefactor bailed them out at the 11th hour this year after the Danish media reported that they were in dire straits. But the future looks bleak according to Anders Laesoe, Santa’s chief helper.