Today I think kids can write to postcode XM4 5HQ (previously SAN TA1) and they are dealt with by Royal Mail somewhere between England and Scotland (or possibly two adjacent sorting offices across the border), but kids have always written these letters for years.
In 1991 I worked as a temp post sorter at a Royal Mail office in SE England dealing with “foreign mail”. At that time Santa didn’t have a postcode; so the letters were just addressed to “NORTH POLE”.
We asked the head postman (a clever but chilled out black dude) “where do these ones go”? (in front of us were about 200 pigeon holes for every country in the world).
He replied “well, anywhere you think Santa could be and is cold; (and keeping a relatively straight face) the elves will get them to him anyway”. (in those days you could still send “telegrams and letters to follow the recipient” even on ships and aircraft as the PTT often controlled the radio networks for these and thus knew where important people might be…
This of course meant the routing depended on your own knowledge of North European geography; he sussed out I knew a fair bit about this and encouraged me to help others who didn’t know as many countries (some had only just arrived in England!) The bulk of the letters went to DK, NO, FI, SE and some to AT. Others went to PL, LV, LT and EE (SU/RU didn’t get any as we thought “they are communists and don’t believe in Santa :laugh_at:)
So the kiddies letters did indeed get sent to Santa; what the foreign PTTs did with them I have no idea. I expect by the time the EU was properly set up in the 21st century some of the smaller countries kicked up a fuss and said “we have plenty enough domestic post at this time without Britain dumping all these extra letters based on a misinterpreted image of a Christian saint (who in many depictions is black!) on us anyway” so we British had to set up our own handling process :laugh_at:
