Credits: I Heart Christmas by Connie Prince, Challenge Template by Twin Mom Scraps

Journaling:

Linda, my “Santee” in the Secret Santa Soiree blog swap was so much fun to shop for and get to now reading a lot of her blog. We definitely have some things in common and it was so hard visiting her blog and just drinking up her personality every time she blogged and not being able to comment. I knew if suddenly this person who doesn’t appear on her followers list but comments like she’s an old friend would be pretty obviously her Secret Santa.

On December 5th, the day Secret Santa packages we supposed to be put in the mail, David and I did a little road trip before he went to work. You see, Linda had mentioned in her blog a year ago that she’d sent her grandkids letters from Santa, by sending them to North Pole New York in an envelope to the postmaster and they arrived for the kids with the North Pole postmark. So a week before shipping da, I wrote her a letter from Santa explaining “an excited elf” had been reading her blog and really wanted to send her a special box, so look out for it.” I sent the letter to the postmaster in Santa Claus, Indiana. Rudolph, Ohio is a short drive from us, so we took Linda’s box and all of our Christmas Cards to get Rudolph’s special holiday postmark!

The post office in Rudolph is a small old fashioned town post office. Seriously, they don’t need to expand because when it’s not Christmastime, the population of Rudolph is served just fine by the small building. Even in December a busy day was about 6 people at any given time, but the front lobby was FULL with that many people. Still, there were Christmas decorations, free cookies and coffee and commemorative sweatshirts. Rudolph knows at this time of year it’s a very special place and they make it feel like you really are at the North Pole asking the lead reindeer to deliver your mail especially for you. It’s pretty cool!