Discover Santa’s House…in Greenland!

From centuries, every Arctic country likes to claim Santa Claus for their own. For decades, people have been puzzling at Christmas over where Santa Claus lives and works, and thus all people come to different conclusions.
Finnish children are taught that he lives in Lapland, Finland’s northernmost region but, if you ask Norwegians, he lives in Drøbak, Norway, and claim he was born hundreds of years ago under a stone in Drobak on the Oslo fjord, while Swedes say he hails from the small town of Mora.
In the battle to beat their Scandinavian neighbors, Finland’s public broadcaster YLE every year sends out a video of a red-cloaked Santa leaving his log cabin on a sleigh drawn by a white reindeer in the frozen landscape that reaches millions of viewers worldwide.
A regular feature for the past 30 years, first broadcast in 1960!
The biggest town in Finnish Lapland, Rovaniemi, has been dubbed the official hometown of Santa Claus. Just south of the Arctic Circle, it attracts more than 300,000 visitors annually, five times the town’s population.
Canadian children, on the other hand, write letters to Santa with the specially allocated Canadian zip code H0H 0H0, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even said in 2013 that everyone knows that Santa Claus is Canadian.
However, to Danish children, there is no doubt he lives in Greenland and, more specifically, in Spragle Bay, in a particular house near the town of Uummannaq, a sparsely populated semiautonomous Danish territory.

If we now approach the matter objectively, then we must unfortunately admit that many stories surround Santa Claus. As for where he comes from, where he lives, and not necessarily the same place, how he works, who he works with, and then of course the big question of how he makes it around the earth in just a day.
And he lives in his cosy little house way up in the north of Greenland. If you’ve been good, you’ll be rewarded with gifts on the evening of December 24 or the morning of December 25.
It depends on where you live.
Santa’s workshop is located on the inland ice, but he also has a large camp at the North Pole so it’s easier for him to travel south in all directions.
The biggest mailbox in the world is Santa’s, and it’s in Nuuk, Greenland, of course, and tens of thousands of children send letters to Santa Claus in Greenland every year and his helpers, the elves, have their hands full answering them all.
Once the distribution of gifts is over, Santa has one last, and very important, task to complete.
The elves get Air Greenland to provide a helicopter when Santa lands at Nuuk Airport. Here he gets on the helicopter with the last bags and flies to Sana, the Queen Ingrid Hospital in the middle of Nuuk, where he distributes gifts to the children who cannot be at home on Christmas Eve.

Well, Denmark’s tradition of placing Santa in Greenland stretches back a long time, but one particular Dane named Flemming Jensen is a major responsible for giving his home this precise spot.
Before kicking off his career as a writer and director, he spent two years as a schoolteacher in Greenland, an experience that inspired him to produce the classic 1989 Danish children’s show, Nissebanden I Grønland (The Elf Gang In Greenland).
The show is a sort of Advent Calendar, a Nordic holiday staple consisting of a Christmas-themed series with exactly 24 episodes, one of them broadcast each day from December 1st to 24th.
Actually not every scene was filmed in Greenland, but the parts with Santa’s home were, at a small house built in traditional Greenlandic style.
As a result, decades later, the series’ lasting popularity and impact has left Uummannaq in the Danish collective imagination as Santa’s home when he’s away from the toy factory, and a welcome sign even proclaims the town as “Santa’s vacation paradise.”

The house is still there, looking exactly just like the day it was built. Although the inside was never shown in the show, it has since been fully furnished by locals and contains a bed, tables, chairs, cabinets, rugs, a fireplace, a stove, pots and pans, a sewing machine, framed photos, and several decorations.
Hiding in the various drawers are letters left by children, some dating back more than 20 years, still preserved in this remote location, an hour’s hike away from a small village on an island in northern Greenland, that has ensured its preservation.
A guestbook allows you to record your visit.
Unfortunately, while the house may be a time capsule, the landscape is not.
In fact, back when The Elf Gang In Greenland was filmed, the area was covered with a field of ice that was so thick and stable that you could drive a vehicle on it.
However, by 2011, climate change had melted it all and now only sea exists where a fjord once did.
If Santa’s naughty list were written today, no doubt we’d see the world’s largest carbon emitters listed on it (although trying to punish them by giving them coal wouldn’t be a good idea.).