The Christmas season is well and truly here! Any well-behaved children in Germany know that this is the time to get their polite requests in and win the affection of the omnipresent German Christmas characters who can make or break their holiday.

Writing to the Weihnachtsmann via Deutsche Post

Thanks to Deutsche Post’s powerful connections, every year children in Germany are granted a direct line to the man in red velvet in the weeks running up to Christmas.

From mid-November, Santa a.k.a the Weihnachtsmann employs the help of his elves and human Deutsche Post workers to open, read and reply to mail from children across the 16 federal states and another 59 countries beyond Germany's borders. In recent years, the majority of these letters have come all the way from China!

For tax reasons, the magnate has multiple addresses in Germany. He is also a busy man, so make sure to get your letters to him soon so that he has plenty of time to reply.

Sending a list to St. Nikolaus in Germany

Children in Germany can also opt for personal correspondence with St. Nikolaus. Contrary to popular belief, St Nikolaus is his own person, and not just a version of Santa that only precocious children know. In Germany, he is best known for leaving sweeties in children’s shoes on the night of December 6.

St. Nick is part of the large portion of the German population with a migrant background, emigrating in the 4th century from what is now Turkey. Since then, he is said to have resurrected three children who had been murdered and pickled by a butcher, leading to his canonisation as the patron saint of little children, sailors and merchants.

The Weihnachtsmann gets a lot of the glory in Germany these days, but that means Nikolaus is often less busy, so the deadline to send away your letters to him falls later. St. Nikolaus also has two houses:

Sending a query to the German Christkind

We’ve got Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation to thank for the Christkind. Uncomfortable with the tradition of Nikolaus, since the idolisation of saints was a Catholic custom, Luther decided to introduce a new figure to re-centre the German Christmas tradition on the child whose birth it celebrated.

The angelic Christkind hides away from children, making her ever more elusive and appealing to get in contact with. Free from the shackles of fame thanks to her partially hidden identity, the Christkind has a play-hard, work-hard mentality, so she can also be contacted at one of her two homes until later in December than the Weihnachtsmann.

Thumb image credit: B Calkins / Shutterstock.com