Letters from Santa - a French idea

AT THIS time of year, children all over the world will be writing letters to Santa and will receive replies - but did you know that this tradition was started in France?

At the beginning of the 1950s, Magdeleine Homo, a postal worker from Veules-les-Rose in Seine-Maritime, Normandy, decided to ignore the custom of having letters addressed to Père Noel destroyed.

The usual procedure had been to leave them undelivered and send them on to the national Dead Letter Office in Paris, but Ms Homo started to open them – which was against the rules - and reply to them herself.

Some years later her idea was made official. In 1962 Le Sécretariat du Père Noël was started by the Ministère des Postes et des Télégraphes of the time, Jacques Marette, and the first official response from Santa was written by his sister, Françoise Dolto.

Today the service, which has now been running for over 50 years, consists of 60 volunteer La Poste workers who handle sending the responses from Libourne, in the Gironde.

La Poste told Connexion: “A letter to Père Noël is often the first letter that a child writes. By the nature of our business, we must defend and ensure the promotion of writing.”

The letters need to have ‘Père Noël’ written on the envelope and the name and address of the child on the other side. Alternatively, children can write him an email via a website, which also features games, printable decorations and cards to send to friends and family. Children must send their letters before December 22 to ensure a response.

Last year, the free service received more than 1.2 million letters and 123,600 emails from 140 countries across the world. La Poste added: “Today this scheme is known far and wide outside the borders of France.”

For more information about how to write a letter or email to Le Sécretariat du Père Noël, visit: Père Noël.