Telegrams to Santa 2024

 I hope everyone had a great Christmas and are looking forward to a safe and enjoyable New Years!

This year was the first "Telegrams to Santa" event held during Heritage Park's Once Upon a Christmas (OUAC) held during the first three weekends of December leading up to Christmas.

Two of our Junior Telegraphers
sending messages to Santa keeping
up the steady traffic for the kids.

"Telegrams to Santa" was a joint effort of the Heritage Park Morse Telegraph Club and the Calgary (CG) Chapter  of the International Morse Telegraph club and featured the talents of our Junior telegraphers sending telegrams to the North Pole on behalf of the children attending  OUAC.  Our Junior telegraphers, 13-15 years in age, were manning the key at Midnapore Station at the park and sending across the Alberta MTC Line to the North Pole office (in the back room of the station) where another Junior telegrapher received the message and replied back. The children received an official colour telegraph form with the reply from Santa and stamped with the Midnapore station stamp as a keep sake.

A Junior Telegrapher 
manning the North Pole station. 

The event was very popular and there was a steady stream of families coming through the station to send their messages. This was important this year because there was a postal strike on so kids couldn't send their traditional letters by mail!

There were a few technical glitches but on the whole the MTC Line connection worked very well and the Juniors did a fine job of handling the traffic even  assisting with queue control when the lines got long.

A description of some of the technical issues can be found in the report on our mailing list here:
Alberta-MTC groups.io mail list

An impressive number of messages were sent to the "North Pole" during OUAC:

Sat 7th    89
Sun 8th    91
Sat 14th   105
Sun 15th   88
Sat 21st   117
Sun 22nd   113

Total      603

In the interests of keeping things moving the messages were not being copied by the receivers, but they were actually being sent. Listening to the sounders at both the Midnapore station and the North Pole the code was very clear and would have been easily copied without the time crunch of a long line up! 

For the first time doing such an event it worked very well. The fantastic effort of our Juniors, and with the support of Heritage Park, the HPMTC and the Calgary Chapter of the MTC, this event was a great success.

Well done everyone and congratulations on helping to make the season a bit brighter for all the kids and their parents!

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year and best wishes for a prosperous, healthy, and safe 2025!

73 
Ciao
Kevin Jepson (KJ)
Instigator and Wire Chief
Alberta MTC Line Project