Press releases

Even Santa needs help sometimes

Thousands of children write a letter to Santa each year with their Christmas greetings or gift wishes. That’s a lot of work! For many years, Swiss Post has put together a specially formed and experienced Christmas team to help Santa during this busy time. The team comes to an agreement with Santa and sends each child a small gift with a card in a reply letter on his behalf. Last year, Santa received over 20,000 letters at his Christmas branch – from all over Switzerland and abroad.

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This year, too, Swiss Post was glad to lend a team of staff to help him answer children’s letters: all letters addressed to Santa are sorted by the five-person Swiss Post team according to language, addressed and a small gift and Christmas story enclosed and prepared for return, complete with festive franking and packaging. A special Christmas stamp and the postmark of the Berne-Bethlehem post office decorate each and every reply. For over 60 years now, Swiss Post has helped Santa to sort these Christmas letters and make sure that as many children as possible receive a reply.

A successful initiative with a long tradition

In 2015, Santa received 20,546 children’s letters containing gift wishes or Christmas greetings. Most of them came from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, followed by Ticino and German-speaking Switzerland. 340 replies were sent to children abroad. Swiss Post’s Christmas team is tireless in its investigative efforts to ensure that as many letters as possible are replied to. Unfortunately, they are not always successful: sometimes the sender’s address is missing and the other details in the letter are insufficient to establish who the sender is. However, the team still managed to reply to 19,749, or 96.1%, of the letters last year. For the other letters, Santa’s team unfortunately had to give up the search for the sender – of course, only after asking for his permission.

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