NORTH POLE, Alaska - It’s early December here, and Mr. and Mrs. Claus are certainly busy.
For starters, there are all those visitors who have dropped by their spacious white-and-red house to sit on Santa’s lap and tell him exactly what they want for Christmas.
In the back, the elves - including dozens of extra little hands hired for the season - are rushing to get thousands of personalized “Letters from Santa” delivered to the local post office.
Outside in temperatures that have already dipped below zero, four of Santa’s reindeer are taking it all lying down in their pen, seemingly oblivious to the all-night mission they will once again be asked to fly in just a few weeks.
This is not the North Pole, of course, but the interior Alaskan community of the same name, 14 miles south of Fairbanks at 64.5 degrees north latitude - just south of the Arctic Circle. Not surprisingly, holiday banners, candy-cane street signs, and other Christmas-themed decorations remain up throughout the year.
And the star attraction in this low-slung community of about 1,800 is the rambling, 55-year-old emporium at 101 St. Nicholas Drive known far and wide as the Santa Claus House.
Like most of North Pole’s 100,000 annual visitors, my wife and I and our 5-year-old twin daughters came to visit the Clauses during the summer - in our case, over the Labor Day weekend, when more than just a hint of snow already hung in the gray northern sky.
We had no trouble finding it, not with the world’s largest Santa statue (42 feet tall and weighing 900 pounds) standing sentinel outside and an equally supersized two-dimensional image posing next to a 30-foot-tall, red-and-white- striped “north” pole.
Having already stocked up on T-shirts, stuffed animals, and other standard Alaska-themed merchandise at previous stops, we bypassed those items for the much larger Christmas Shoppe in back. Just as the promotional materials promise, it is indeed “Christmas every day.” Carols drifted through the air, while White Christmas, the 1954 Bing Crosby/Danny Kaye movie, plays continuously on an elevated TV monitor.
We had scarcely begun surveying row upon row of holiday merchandise, including some distinctly Alaskan items - Eskimo nativity sets, beaver-pelt pillows, and birch bowls - when the jingle of sleigh bells heralded the return of the jolly old homeowner himself, back from a coffee break. Attired in his traditional white-trimmed plush red suit, he climbed into his equally plush chair, and our girls, suddenly stricken with shyness, were his first photo-op customers ($5 with their camera, free with ours).
They were followed by a German couple in their 60s who could not quite make up their minds how seriously to take this distinctly American encounter, and two thirtysomething newlyweds from California who were a little shy about telling the old married man exactly what they wanted.
Any hopes Santa might have had for an afternoon nap went up the chimney with the arrival of a bus full of post-cruise seniors from Minnesota who had few qualms about either plopping onto his lap (mostly the women) or standing alongside (mostly the men).
While the grandparents dashed off their just-bought postcards so they could be stamped “Santa’s Official Mail” and placed orders for the Santa Claus House’s trademark “Letter from Santa,” we slipped outside to check on Dasher, Blitzen, Comet and Cupid. None of the four domesticated caribou looked the least bit flightworthy, but then they still had four months to get in shape - or so we explained to our daughters.
Placards attached to spruce trees explained the historical origins of such Christmas traditions as the 12 days, the candy cane and the Christmas tree - unexpected notes of serious religion in an otherwise constant chorus of commercialism.
If nothing else, the Santa Claus House comes by its commercialism honestly. Situated along a marshy creek known as Fourteen-Mile Slough, the site was homesteaded in 1944 by Bon Davis, who named the soon-to-be-established whistle-stop on the Alaska Railroad for himself.
The development company that bought out Davis renamed the settlement North Pole, to attract a toy manufacturer that could label its products “Made at the North Pole.” But given North Pole’s high shipping costs and shallow labor pool, no toy manufacturer ever materialized.
But Conrad and Nellie Miller, homesteaders from Washington state who had settled in Fairbanks in 1949 with only $1.40 to their names, did.
Miller, a traveling fur trader who had taken to dressing up as Santa Claus when calling on native villages in the winter, decided that North Pole - sitting between two growing military bases - would be the site of his own permanent trading post.
As the company story goes, Miller was building a wall one day in 1952 when he was recognized by one of the native children he had visited. “Hey, Santa Claus,” the boy called, “are you building a new house?”
It was a marketing match made in frontier Alaska, and Miller promptly ran it up the North Pole. A half-century later, and thanks to quantum leaps in transportation and communication (especially the Internet), plus the 1983 arrival of that fiberglass Santa - who started off life as a prototype for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair - the Santa Claus House is an institution, securely in the hands of the Miller children.
Toting some truly unique early Christmas gifts, we repaired to our rental sleigh and headed back to Fairbanks. As we drove north out of North Pole, I couldn’t help but marvel at the resourcefulness and determination of those territorial pioneers - and ponder the ultimate mystery of the Santa Claus House:
If every day here really is Christmas, when do they hold their “after Christmas” sale?
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