Missouri is full of mispronounced French placenames, think Versailles, Gravois Mills or Carondelet. The term Ozark is itself a corruption of a French phrase.
Noel, Missouri is just one more example, but for a month or so every year, the small town in the southwest corner of the state becomes Noel, the Christmas City.
And at this point, if you’re reading this instead of listening to it, I hope you get what I mean.
It all started in 1932 when French immigrant to the U.S. Edward T. Roussett took over as the town's postmaster and thought up an idea for a holiday postmark.
"In his neck of the woods that (as in Noel) just means Christmas. So, he decided to make Noel the Christmas City, and he got with a bunch of the community, and they just loved the idea. So, he went out and purchased stamps and they just started doing it.”
That’s how Patricia Coggin, Postmaster for Noel, Missouri described it.
Her and her staff and volunteers are carrying on a nearly century old tradition now, marking mail that passes through their post office with holiday themed stamps, not much different than the Christmas City stamps Roussett bought back in the 30s; sharing the holiday spirit and playing part in the traditions of tens of thousands of people across the country and world every year.
It is a big deal that Coggin wasn’t aware of when she took on the role of postmaster five years ago.
"I thought it was absolutely amazing. I've never seen a tradition go as long as this one has,” she said.
Now in their 92nd year Coggin explained that it doesn’t seem like things are slowing down.
"Even, you know, during Covid and stuff. I thought, oh, it's going to drop. But we ended up with 45,000 cards that year. Um, last year we did 55,000. And so, it's going back up because all the years before we were doing 65,000 or more. So, I'm hoping to hit that mark again this year.”
In the first week of December when we spoke, they’d already hit 8500 pieces of mail. She credits the media with helping to spread the word, not just now, but 92 years ago when they first started.
Back then singer and national radio star of the 1930s and 40s Kate Smith purportedly made the Noel story a part of her Christmas specials. She shared the city’s Christmas postmarking tradition to listeners across the country, and stories say they were stamping almost half-a-million pieces of mail a year back then. As the story goes, in 1947 Noel residents thanked Smith by baking her a 300-pound fruitcake.
Now the Christmas treats are reserved for volunteers hard at work and visitors who make the trip to the festive post office on Noel’s main drag.
"When you walk into the post office, there is coffee, hot water, hot chocolate, fresh cookies and candies that we bake and bring in to our volunteers. So yeah, you walk in and it's like you're in a Christmas land.”
Coggin said it takes 60 volunteers cheerfully working in two shifts every day the office is open to keep up with the stamping. She had to turn down the Christmas music during one of our phone calls.
And many people do make the trip themselves.
"We have had people drive 150, 160 miles because they actually want to come to the Christmas City,” she explained, “I have them put a pin of where they came from so we can keep track of that. They love coming here and getting pictures and stuff and saying they were actually here to drop off their cards, so they get tickled by that. I have volunteers and customers that come in that are grandparents now, and they talk about when their grandparents would come in and bring them when they were kids. So now we have grandparents that are coming in, bringing their grandkids, and it's just a tradition that has just always passed down.”
And of course, they still get thousands of pieces of mail too, from as far away as France, China and Japan. I asked Coggin to walk me through the process
"They will send them in a package and then I will open them, get all their cards out. You have to have the postage stamp on them, so you pay for your cards. You get them all addressed, you send them in to us, we will put our special stamps on them, and then we will cancel the stamp with our cancellation, instead of it running through Springfield's machine and getting it cancelled there. So, it will actually be cancelled in Noel. I put them in a totally separate tub, letting them know in Springfield: do not send them through your cancellation machine. And they bypass that machine and then they head out for delivery.”
Coggin and her volunteers will be at it until the post office closes for the Christmas holiday. She said her and her paid staff get stragglers coming in through January. In an era when we do less and less personal mailing and many only think about the post when we have package on the way, she said traditions like this bring some magic back to the mailbox.
"When it comes to this, they still want to keep the tradition going, so they purposely make sure that they get to this post office. And like I said, the media doing it, stories and stuff. We're getting people every year, new people that come in and go, this is amazing. I just heard about this, you know, how do I do it? And some of them will come in and say, can I please stamp my own cards? I'm like, absolutely, you know, so we stand there with them and show them how to use the stamps, and they get tickled to be able to stamp their own cards. So yeah, it's a really great.”