Christmas in July

Thursday, July 26, 2007

NORTH POLE, ALASKA — Ho, ho, ho! Welcome to Santaland RV Park, where it’s Christmas every day of the year. The campground is located at 125 St. Nicholas Drive, and the sites are set out on lanes named Donner, Prancer, Dancer, Blitzen, Comet and Rudolph! The picnic tables are painted red on one lane and green on the next, and each electrical connection box is decorated with a cutout of a snowman’s head. Every morning, Santa’s elves even come to pick up your garbage right at your site.
We knew we had arrived at the right place when we saw, from the highway, a huge figure of Santa Claus, standing about 30 feet high, studiously checking a large list of children’s names clutched in his mitten. Right next to the campground is Santa Claus House, a beautiful white building with shakes on the roof and red trim around the dormers. The outside walls are tiled in white with pictures of children, reindeer, Christmas trees and snowmen, and Christmas music wafts on the breeze. Out back are two of Santa’s reindeer (a.k.a. caribou) with magnificent racks of antlers.
Inside is a gift shop full of souvenirs of North Pole, decorations, T-shirts and other items, including some beautifully crafted nativity scenes. We did some browsing, and when I turned a corner, there, seated on a large easy chair was the Elf Himself — a real live Santa Claus with a real white beard, dressed in a light cotton shirt (with a Christmas print, of course), and, sitting next to him, Mrs. Claus, contentedly knitting. I went over to say hello, and Santa reached for my hand to shake it, drawing me to sit on his knee when I took hold! A friendly customer kindly snapped a photo of me on Santa’s knee with Val perched on the arm of Mrs. Claus’s chair. Santa really is a very nice gentleman with sparkly eyes and a friendly word for everyone.
The town of North Pole came to be in the late 1940s when it was hoped that the name would attract toy manufacturers who could advertise that their products were made in North Pole. The factories didn’t materialize, but the name stuck, and the town’s theme is "where the spirit of Christmas lives year round". Its streets are named Mistletoe Drive and Santa Claus Lane and the lampposts are white with red stripes and curved at the top like giant candy canes. It’s kind of a fun place to be!
Our drive here today was the first in a long time where I had the sun on my side of the vehicle most of the way. We’re headed east now! We left the mountain ranges of Denali and followed the Nenana River a good distance, passing through flat land a lot of the way, but coming to several high points that provided huge vistas to the north with plains, rivers and far-off mountains, and, later on, the same type of expansive views to the south. The Nenana River is a key artery for the transport of goods to northern communities, and this is done on freight barges that load up at the town of Nenana. The town was also a hub for the construction of the Alaska railway in the 1920s.
We’re still in Gold Rush country too, so there are gold-panning activities for the tourists in places like Ester, just east of Fairbanks, and theatre nights with a Gold Rush theme. The city of Fairbanks owes its beginnings to gold miners who sailed up the Chena River (which runs through the city) and settled here. The name refers, not to the lovely scenery next to the river, but to Charles W. Fairbanks, a senior senator from Indiana who became vice-president to US President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900s.
It was not a long drive to Fairbanks, and we drove right through to get to North Pole, just on the outskirts at the east end of the city. We will go back and do some more exploring tomorrow.
We’re at the 64th parallel, only two degrees of latitude south of the Arctic Circle, and to date the farthest north we’ve been. Even with this kind of chilly context, we are experiencing some of the warmest weather of our trip! Val actually dug out his sandals and shorts today, and the thermometer on the truck registered a balmy 76 degrees Fahrenheit! Everyone is complaining about the oppressive heat, but we just smile.