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Seriously postal: ‘World’s largest Santa’s mailbox’ gives creator a gigantic challenge

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It’s said Santa needs to travel 11 million km/h to deliver his gifts, assuming no bathroom breaks or pauses to eat all those cookies. There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding thesis for how long it takes him to read all the letters to him, but Po Lin Lee might qualify as at least for fill-in duty should the jolly old elf be waylaid by a traffic cop or too much cholesterol.

The Hong Kong native now living in Longyearbyen estimates as many as 10,000 letters were deposited this year in the “world’s largest Santa’s mailbox” she donated to the city during the 2013 Christmas season.

“I read them all,” she said. But “they’re in different languages. Then I try to use Google Translate and ask friends.”

Lee said she tries to spend an hour or two a day reading the letters when she’s in town, sometimes in the mailbox itself since it has two indoor stories including a sitting area.

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Po Lin Lee reads a giant handmade Christmas card to Santa left in the “world’s largest” mailbox she had built for him. Lee estimates up to 10,000 letters were deposited this year in the box. Photo by Mark Sabbatini / Icepeople.

The letter writers vary predictably by season: lots of visitors during peak tourism months (she estimates about 4,000 were deposited this summer) and lots of local youths when Christmas is near. Among this week’s batch was a large envelope containing a packet of letters that apparently are from a group of local kindergarten students apparently covering their bets after depositing letters in Santa’s “official” mailbox at the base of Mine 2B days earlier.

The mailbox at Sjøområdet, built in secret in a warehouse before being unveiled, is more than nine meters high and cost about 500,000 kroner – which Lee paid for out of her pocket.

About Post Author

Mark Sabbatini

I'm a professional transient living on a tiny Norwegian island next door to the North Pole, where once a week (or thereabouts) I pollute our extreme and pristine environment with paper fishwrappers decorated with seemingly random letters that would cause a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters to die of humiliation. Such is the wisdom one acquires after more than 25 years in the world's second-least-respected occupation, much of it roaming the seven continents in search of jazz, unrecognizable street food and escorts I f****d with by insisting they give me the platonic tours of their cities promised in their ads. But it turns out this tiny group of islands known as Svalbard is my True Love and, generous contributions from you willing, I'll keep littering until they dig my body out when my climate-change-deformed apartment collapses or they exile my penniless ass because I'm not even worthy of washing your dirty dishes.
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