If Your Child Wrote To Santa Claus At The North Pole And Got A Reply Here’s One News Agency Reason Why

Philip M. Stone December 16, 2010 Follow on Twitter

Children around the world write every year to Santa Claus (Father Christmas) at the North Pole telling him how good they have been all year and they hope the jolly old man will reward them with the presents they want, especially when offered the bribe of milk and biscuits left on the kitchen table. And they can expect a written reply from the North Pole, or at least not too far away from there!

A reply from Santa at the North Pole? Yes, there is a news agency story to that.

The clocks have to turn back 37 years to Helsinki, Finland, where on a freezing October morning the Helsinki bureau manager for United Press International (UPI) was in his usual daily morning routine, stuffing his face with fresh cream-filled pastries prepared in the shop right below the bureau, and drinking coffee that his secretary made so strong that if a spoon was placed in the cup it would have probably dissolved. The secretary, meanwhile, had no such luxuries – she was on a continual diet which the bureau manager should have been, too – so she sat before him translating  out loud the headlines in that morning’s Helsingin Sanomat newspaper – he never did get the hang of Finnish.

And as usual, the news that day was pretty blah to a foreign correspondent. But near the end of the exercise with the secretary deep into the inside pages, she spotted a small three paragraph item buried at the bottom of the page and she read out loud, “Finnish post office to stop replying to letters written to Father Christmas.” The bureau manager, at the ripe experienced age of 26 and in his first such executive position, froze stuffing his mouth, he put down the coffee cup and slowly told the secretary, “read me more.”

There were only a few bare details – it was almost like a filler -- so the bureau manager who did not speak a word of Finnish (you try it sometime!) told her to get onto the Post Office and find out all she could.  Within 30 minutes she had it all.

It seemed there was a tradition in those days by many post offices around the world that when they received letters addressed to Santa Claus or Father Christmas at the North Pole that they would send those letters to the main post offices in either Norway, Sweden, or Finland. And in Finland at least there was a tradition that each November the Post Office would hire the same three ladies who understood and wrote decent English – not so common in those days --  to actually reply to those letters. A lovely Christmas touch. But that year Post Office Minister Pekka Tarjanne (yes, the very same Pekka Tarjanne who later spent many years in Geneva as secretary-general of the UN’s ITU) decided as an economy measure not to hire the ladies. The letters from the world’s children would go unanswered.

Now Helsinki was not exactly the news capital of the world, so the news hungry young bureau manager was always on the outlook for something international and he just felt in his bones he had something. Within 15 minutes (some stories can take forever to write, some just flow off the fingers as that one did) he had pounded out on his vintage Olympia typewriter a couple of pages of copy, and then it was into the transmission room to hit the keys of the blind puncher (no paper to see what was being produced; you just had to be letter perfect first time) to produce the tape to go onto the transmitter to Stockholm where they would manually take the tape and put it on another transmitter connected directly to the London computer controlling the UPI European, Middle East and Africa client wires, while also forwarding it to New York for handling by the foreign desk there for filing onto the US news wires (yes, that is how it was back in the 70s!)

The lead went something like this: “HELSINKI (UPI) – The Finnish Post Office announced today it was playing ‘Scrooge’ to the world’s children and it would not be answering their letters to Santa Claus this year.”

Satisfied that a good morning’s work had been done the bureau manager then decided it was time for a leisurely lunch. But when he got back to the office in an hour or so (more so than hour) his secretary greeted him with a face of panic (in those days there were no mobile phones, pagers, let alone email). She took him into the wire room where the pre-World War II Siemens printers were close to burning up with a continual stream of messages from UPI editors at world headquarters in the Daily News Building in New York. They were demanding, “Upbuild, Upbuild. We alone this story. It’s number one on New York Times radio station …” (In those days it seemed the UPI international news were governed by what that one radio station  that had both AP and UPI reported on its hourly newscast!)

And so the rest of the day was spent getting more quotes and it was obvious the Post Office was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the unwanted international publicity.

Now in those days geographically isolated Finland sharing a long border with the Soviet bear was extremely self-conscious of protecting its western international status. The American AP and UPI, the Soviet Novosti and TASS, and the Chinese  Xinhua  had staff correspondents there, but except for a couple of Nordic newspapers no one else did. AFP, Reuters, The Financial Times, The London Times and a few others covered via stringers. So if the world at large was going to hear and write about Finland the information usually came first from one of the American news agencies.

The Finnish foreign ministry, wanting to keep its pulse on such international coverage, had a policy that Finnish embassies around the world translate into Finnish any story appearing in their country about Finland and that would be telexed back to the ministry’s press office. And apparently that day, so the legend goes, the traffic was so strong the 50-baud telexes just couldn’t keep up!

This had turned into an international crisis. Finland’s good name was being damned the world over. There had to be a solution and fast.

As memory serves, the Foreign Trade Association, recognizing a PR disaster when it saw one, stepped into the breach. It announced taking over the responsibility that year of replying to the world’s children, and it set up a conference room at its Helsinki headquarters with lots of red candles and staffed it with ladies who could respond to the letters in several languages, not just English – and the association said it would take steps to ensure the letter answering would be done every year thereafter.

Having set up the good deed they needed to get the word out to the world so the UPI troublemaker was invited to take a look at their Santa operation and read some of the letters the children had written.

And that was heart-wrenching. Northern Ireland, for instance, was in the worst of the “Troubles” and the letters from children there tore your heart out. Their daddy was killed, or sent to prison, and they were lonely, but they had been good children all year and these were the toys they really wanted, and there would be milk and biscuits left on the kitchen table.

The UPI manager took that back to his office and wrote the new story – basically letting those letters do the telling -- and it is doubtful that the Helsinki dateline had been seen so many global front pages  as that story did. There were continual demands for more, so regular stories ran through Christmas basically just quoting the children’s’ letters.

Today, the Finns have Santa Claus letter writing well under control from his home in Rovaniemi, at the Finnish Arctic Circle. It’s a major operation, letters are responded to in nine languages, and they say they get in excess of 700,000 letters annually with Santa even on email. The Finnish Post Office has even given him an official address: Santa Claus, Arctic Circle, 96930 Rovaniemi, Finland 

There is one other Santa story that should be told, although this one never made it to the UPI client wires but rather just to the global UPI bureau message wires. It had become a Helsinki UPI tradition that on early Christmas Eve a story like this was sent:

“Helsinki (UPI) – Finnish air defense sources report a strange object has taken off from near Rovaniemi at the Arctic Circle. The sources reported the blip on their radar screen was different to that of a plane – it appeared to take the shape of a large gift-laden sleigh being pulled by Finnish reindeer. The sources refused to confirm reports that “Ho, Ho, Ho” could be heard coming from the object. It left Finnish air space heading north over the Pole.”

The story would then be led again and again by UPI bureaus around the word according to their time zones reporting on the sleigh’s global progress. But as a sign of the times one year the Tel Aviv bureau reported: “TEL AVIV (UPI) – A strange objected entered Israeli air space tonight and unconfirmed reports say it was immediately shot down.” The bureau was pleased to report in a new lead later that the unconfirmed shooting had turned out not to be true.

That story was UPI’s foreign correspondents annual Christmas present to themselves and their families.  Sadly, today there is no UPI Helsinki bureau, and that sleigh story long ago stopped making the rounds. But there is still a former UPI Helsinki bureau manager who knows in his heart he played a part in ensuring the world’s children today still get replies to their Santa letters.