Letters to Santa Claus.
A very important question of children around the world is how to convey their Christmas wishes to Santa Claus. For the millions who write letters every year the question is how to get their letters to the right address. For this the post office has made special arrangements. In the United States, the U.S.P.S. Operation Santa Claus takes charge. In Canada children send letters to Santa Claus or Pere Noel at the North Pole, postal code HOHOHO. In Denmark Santa live in Greenland and letters are forwarded to him there through the Danish Tourist Association. In Norway Santa Claus lives in a town called Drobak and has his own postal station to handle his mail. In Germany they have a special Celestial Post Office in the city of Augsburg to reach the Christ Child. In Austria kids direct their mail to the village of Christkindl, near Stryr, Upper Austria. Other methods of trying to get their wishes to Santa include putting the letter in the fireplace so the smoke will carry their wishes up the chimney and beyond until they reach Father Christmas. Or leaving the note in a shoe beside the tree or on the windowsill. Swiss children know their letters left on the windowsill have been received because of the chocolate left behind.
70,000,000 letters are processed each year with either the mark of a creche or the Three Kings, depending on whether the letter is mailed closer to Christmas or Epiphany. In Switzerland a December 6 post mark form the town of St. Niklaus is a collectible item.
A recent study of hundreds of American children revealed that boys and girls request the same amount of gifts, but that girls write longer and more polite letters. Select this link to view our Santa Ornaments.

History of Silent Night.
The most widely sung Christmas carol in the world began as a poem called, Stille Nacht by Austrian priest Josef Mohr in 1816. two years later, preparing for the Christmas Eve service in Oberndorfs St. Nicholas church, Mohr discovered that the organ was not functioning. Legend has attributed the failure to mice gnawing through he bellows, but it is more likely that the organ in the riverside church suffered from excessive moisture and rust in its works. Mohr asked the organist Franz Gruber to compose a guitar setting for his poem and the resulting composition was sung at the midnight service.
The song would probably have been performed only on that single occasion and forgotten had a visiting musician not seen the music in the church in the early 1820s and taken it away with him. It was played throughout Austria and Germany for the next few years, growing in popularity. The authorship of the piece remained a mystery until 1854, by which time Josef Mohr was dead. The carols had been attributed to many different composers but the director of the Royal Court Choir of Berlin, where Silent Night had become the favorite of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, researched the origins of the carol and succeeded in having its true creators credited for their work.
The song has been translated into over 300 languages. American Episcopal priest John Freeman Young wrote the English version in 1863. Select this link to view our Christmas Ornament Sets.