It’s All in the Name

OK, my first question: How did it get the name “Santa Claus”?

A funny story, that, as interpreted in the legal documents displayed in the Santa Claus Museum.

In January 1856, this little smudge on the Indiana map was called Santa Fe. The inhabitants wanted a post office and duly applied for one with the government. Their request was denied with a perfunctory “Choose another name” scrawled across the application. Apparently another Santa Fe had beat them to the title (in Indiana, not New Mexico).

The good folks of Santa Fe met to give their home a new and worthy name. Imagine the scene. Ten, maybe twelve, of the town’s top who-zzits gather in the church/town hall. It’s a frosty afternoon; winter holds a tight grip on frozen earth. People are bundled in coats and wraps. Their breath comes out in mist as they bandy dozens of ideas. It’s the third or fourth meeting already.

Perhaps in gratitude for their little town, they want to keep “santa” as part of the name, but names like Santa Ana, Santa Maria, and Santa Nicola just don’t seem to ring. Maybe an hour ticks by, but still no good ideas. Then someone blurts, “Santa Claus!”

Everyone laughs, murmurs, laughs some more. A thoughtful silence follows.

“I like it,” says one, blowing into his gloves.

“Mmmm,” begins the eldest, sucking on a pipe. “Yup. It might work.”

Another rubs his hands in his armpits. “My wife’s got supper, and I got horses to feed. I don’t care what we name it. Let’s just decide.”

“All in favor?” says the first.

So how ever that meeting went, the name Santa Claus sticks. Only in those times of fluid spelling rules, an “e” gets added to “Claus” on the application. This second town name is accepted, and Santa Clause, Indiana, is born. (Decades later, businesses will pay millions of dollars for a similar service of producing the perfect company name. Self-proclaimed specialists will white-board ideas for weeks, pass a short list of 50 candidates past focus groups, marketing committees, and the building janitor, and present, by an hours-long PowerPoint show and fifteen copies of a 127-page marketing analysis, the one absolutely ideal, “it captures your company’s entire essence in one never-before-seen-word” name…which is then tossed out in favor of something the marketing director’s five-year-old niece made up over her peanut butter and jelly lunch last Tuesday.)

Anyway, their home happily named, the townsfolk of Santa Clause live peaceably for a few years. But that “e” just bugs some people. In 1863, and undoubtedly after a few heated debates, the town requests to change the post office’s official spelling to “Santa Claus”—probably because that is, as everyone knows, the proper spelling on Mr. Claus’ birth certificate.

Done? Not so. In 1895, the town once again revisits the vexing issue of its spelling. This time they inexplicably change it to the one-word “Santaclaus,” perhaps in some weird premonition of the compound lexemes that would mark the heyday of software programs a hundred years later. Once again the government issues the new postmark, and the committee meetings stop.

Finally, in 1928, the local grammarians, who still wince and twitch a knee over every piece of mail addressed to the appalling one-word Santaclaus, raise their pens and put their collective dictionary down. Their town will be spelled the proper way, or not at all: “Santa Claus.” Yet another approved application goes into the government’s folder on that wiffle-waffling little town in southern Indiana, and it’s been the current spelling ever since.

But no matter how they spelled it, in the 1910s the town unwittingly and forever became the clearinghouse of all mail destined for the North Pole. Since the day the first starry-eyed child scrawled his first letter to Santa and mom posted it in the mail, all letters addressed to Santa Claus were, reasonably so, delivered here. And the town answered them. Year after year, volunteer after volunteer, even as the town itself struggled to stay alive.

For whatever reasons—dwindling population, a rural economy, the effects of WWI—in 1931, the U.S. government declared the town of Santa Claus too small to warrant its own post office, and announced they were closing it down.

They hadn’t counted on the fact that an entire nation had actually heard of the place thanks to Ripley’s Believe It or Not books: “Believe it or not, there is a Santa Claus, and he lives in Indiana!” Word got out of the government’s plan to close the jolly old elf’s post office, and unprecedented public outcry ensued. Angry parents and wailing tots. Newspaper headlines. Petitions. Moral outrage. Pleas to common decency and the future mental health of all children who still believed in Santa.

Federal officials, recognizing a political hot potato when they saw one, kept the post office open.

By then, thousands of letters addressed to “Santa Claus” were coming each year. And the count continues to grow. So until the U.S. Postal Service actually goes belly up, you can be assured that any letter you write to Santa this year will indeed reach its recipient without fail—sometimes even without postage.

An early ad campaign for Santa.

A teensy taste of Santa’s mail through the years.

This from around the 1960s, I think.

1943. I liked how polite this child was. Another letter from an older man asked Santa to send him a woman.

2005: letters (and want lists) have gone high tech.

Fashion advice from a young “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”?

Santa’s Candy Castle, a remnant of America’s “first themed park.” The elves still make really yummy caramels and hot chocolate.

Christmas year-round inside, where kids can use the Elf Network to write and send letters to Santa.

The glory days of Santa’s mailboxes...

...as fanciful as a child’s fancy...

...now replaced by a bland little steel box of government-issue design—just the thing to tantalize those little tots!

Its famous namesake aside, the Santa Claus I tour today might still be only a highway-bypassed town, with 37 people processing all that holiday mail (the entire population in the mid ’60s), had it not been for another name of more local fame—William A. Koch.

While not yet coined, the phrase “If you build it, they will come” was his working belief. His father had already opened a theme park called Santa Claus Land (later named Holiday World). The son wanted to build, from corn fields and dirt up, an entire resort town that would house hundreds of residents and draw thousands of visitors. Banks backed the idea when Koch had little more than sketches and dreams. Realtors sold waterfront homes where a lake didn’t yet exist, and people bought them sight unseen. Important new highways were directed southward to bring traffic through Spencer County (which also had the bonus of an historical Lincoln connection).

The people came.

And they still come. The Santa Claus of today, population 2,200, is replete with a man-made boating lake, golfing resort, 2,300-acre gated community, hometown bank and grocer, Rudolph RV Camp, Holiday World amusement park, and two Lincoln historical parks. Santa still receives his mail here. The region still draws thousands of vacationers. And the wolf of Holiday World still howls every 60 seconds across the town.