About MerryHoHo

HELLO AWIN

Most of the internet writes about Christmas as though Santa Claus were the only answer. He is not. In 56 countries covered here the presents come from 66 different figures on eight different dates — Ježíšek leaves them under the tree in Czechia on the evening of the 24th, Sinterklaas arrives in the Netherlands on 5 December, the Three Kings on 6 January in Spain and Mexico, Saint Nicholas twice over in Ukraine because a calendar reform did not move every household on the day it was signed.

This site answers two questions for each of those countries: who brings the presents and when, and which services will send a personalised greeting from that specific figure. A video of a red-suited Santa is the wrong character in a good part of Europe, and nothing that ranks in English will tell a parent in Ljubljana that.

How the research is done

Every service listed was opened in a browser and looked at. Prices are what the service itself shows, with the date it was checked recorded against the entry. A surprising number of services in this category publish no price outside their own checkout — where that is the case the comparison says so rather than guessing, and a fact that has not been verified is left out instead of being filled with something plausible.

The cultural material — names, dates, who the figure is locally — is written per country rather than translated from one English master text, because a sentence that works for every country is worth nothing to any of them.

How this is paid for

Some outbound links to services may earn a commission. This never changes whether a service is listed, what is written about it, or the order it appears in — ordering is driven by how much we actually know about an entry, and the free options are listed alongside the paid ones with their prices stated as plainly. Several of the best answers on this site cost nothing, including national postal programmes, and those pay nothing.

Corrections

If an entry about your service is wrong or out of date it will be corrected or removed, whether or not there is any commercial relationship. If a local tradition is described wrongly, the same applies — that is the part most likely to need fixing, and the part we most want to hear about. Contact details are on the legal page.

See also the editorial policy and the privacy notice.