Daniel MacIsaac
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Dec 03/99) - A little girl in Romania thinks Santa Claus lives in Inuvik.

Thanks to the staff at the Inuvik post office, she'll soon be convinced he does.

"I was opening the mail when I saw this funny little letter and realized it was for Santa and from Romania," said Maryann Springett last Friday. And so the story began.

A staffer at Inuvik's Canada Post Outlet, Springett said it was co-worker Anne Wood who tracked down Togo's restaurant cook Christian Catana to translate the letter.

"It took him a while because of the hand-writing," said Springett. "We were watching and thinking we'd end up going to Boreal Books and buy her some nice little thing from Canada, something from the North."

But Springett said the 10-year-old author, Raluca Becheru, had definite ideas about what she'd like from Father Christmas.

"Christian started translating and it turned out the first thing she wanted was a calculator and the second thing was a Furby," she said with a laugh. "We were waiting for him to read something else; we were looking for her to ask for something a little bit cheaper."

Springett said the staff bounced around the idea and gave Wood the task of picking up either a Furby or a calculator when she travelled to Edmonton on business last weekend, but not both gifts.

"We're scared we might get 100,000 letters from Romania," she laughed.

Springett said she and Wood, along with Penny Squires, will also pick up the tab for sending the package to Romania. It may not arrive in time for Christmas, but definitely in time to give Raluca a nice surprise, especially since Catana will send their reply in Raluca's mother tongue.

"She'll be extra surprised since she's going to think that Santa Claus can speak Romanian," he said.

Springett said "posties" right across the country act as Santa's helpers every Christmas by answering children's letters. She said she has been doing so for the past 20 years, eight of them in Inuvik. She also recruits family and friends to help her out, and includes a candy cane with each reply.

"I got one letter about three years ago from this little kid, and she said all she wanted for Christmas was a candy cane," said Springett. "It made me think how much we take for granted and this one little kid said that's all she'd like. So I figured if she'd want one, they all would."

Springett said the post office would be setting up its special Santa mailbox this week. And she hopes new supervisor Ian Selluski can be convinced to carry on yet another tradition that staff started last year: handing out the gift of a starter stamp-collecting kit to a couple kids who send the nicest letters.

Catana, a native of Arad in southwestern Romania, said he was pretty shocked to see a letter arrive in the Arctic from his homeland. He said Raluca likely got the Inuvik address from a Romanian- or French-language magazine, and that for a typical Romanian even an inexpensive calculator might be out of reach.

Springett ended her story by saying that Canada Post staffers sometimes receive little gifts of their own from the children, in the form of candies, stickers or jokes.