Imagine living on a street named for a Christmas carol, beside a lake called Holly, in a town where a giant Santa watches over things from the highest hill. For the families of one small Indiana town, that's just home. And it's been that way, in some form, for generations.
The town is Santa Claus, Indiana, in Spencer County, in the southwestern part of the state. It's home to Christmas-themed attractions open well beyond December, a post office that answers letters to Santa, and a famous holiday theme park. All of it traces back to a town that simply needed a new name.
A Post Office Problem
In the mid-1800s, the little settlement was known as Santa Fe. When residents applied for a post office in 1856, their application came back with a blunt message: choose some name other than Santa Fe. Indiana already had one.
Exactly how they landed on Santa Claus has been lost to legend, and there are many versions of the story. What we know for sure is that the Post Office Department accepted the name Santa Claus in 1856. Today it's said to be the world's only post office named after the jolly old elf.
Letters From Around the World
For years, the name went mostly unnoticed. That changed in the late 1920s, when postmaster James Martin started promoting the town's special Santa Claus postmark. Holiday mail poured in, so much that the Post Office decided there would never be another Santa Claus post office in the United States. In 1929, Ripley's Believe It or Not featured the town's busy post office.
Today the post office still receives thousands of letters to Santa from all over the world each year. A group of volunteers called Santa's Elves makes sure every child gets a reply, a tradition going back to at least 1914. Each December, the post office also offers a special hand-stamped holiday postmark, drawing mail from collectors everywhere.
A Candy Castle and a Concrete Santa
The town's name inspired some creative businessmen. In 1935, Milt Harris opened Santa's Candy Castle, a red-brick castle sponsored by a candy company. It was the town's first tourist attraction and is said to be the first themed attraction in the country.
A rival, Carl Barrett, thought Harris was too commercial and built his own Santa Claus Park. On Christmas Day 1935, he dedicated a 22-foot Santa statue on the highest hill in town. It was promoted as solid granite, but when cracks appeared years later, people discovered it was actually concrete. The 40-ton statue was restored in 2011.
The First Theme Park?
In 1946, retired businessman Louis J. Koch opened Santa Claus Land, which is claimed to be the world's first theme park. At first, visitors could meet Santa, browse a toy shop, and ride children's attractions for free. It later grew into Holiday World and Splashin' Safari, adding sections for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July. It's still run by the Koch family and draws more than a million visitors a year.
Most residents now live in Christmas Lake Village, a community built around three lakes named Christmas Lake, Lake Holly, and Lake Noel, with street names inspired by the season. The town has grown from 927 people in 1990 to about 2,586 in 2020.
So if you ever crave a little holiday cheer in the middle of July, you know where to go. In Santa Claus, Indiana, it's always beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
