Even Santa Claus has gone high-tech in his log cabin in lapland: computers in Reindeer Land in Rovaniemi, Finland, sort letters from 144 nations, which arrive at a rate of 10,000 a day in the runup Christmas, reports the Wall Street Journal; letters increasingly come from Eastern Europe as restrictions on celebrating Christmas ease and their exotic stamps are sold for the benefit of the United Nations Childrens Fund: Santa’s helpers send standard replies in a choice of eight languages but there are plans for a computer to draft more personal responses; thousands of phone calls are also received and now a videophone line in a Finnish hospital enables children to see and hear Santa at his headquarters.
