Maybe this Christmas the kids, being technology oriented, are just e-mailing their wish lists directly to Santa Claus.

But if they want a regular letter back from Santa, mailed from his shop at the North Pole, the U.S. Postal Service could handle that.

Back before there was e-mail, there were some towns named so their post offices would be a great place for mail for special occasions, such as Christmas and Easter.

In North Pole, Alaska, the post office receives mail to be re-sent, postmarked “North Pole.” The town gets visitors who stop to see a giant Santa who greets you alongside a street named “Santa Claus Lane” with light poles striped like candy canes.

The post office in Loveland, Colo., sometimes has a busy time around Valentines Day, so cards and letters can be sent from “Love land.” I suspect the towns of Valentine in Arizona and Nebraska may get some of the same kind of traffic. And a couple other Colorado towns might be related to our subjects: Holly for Christmas and Romeo for Valentines.

Americans don’t have a lock on the idea. Laplanders in northern Finland have a healthy tourist business with claims that Santa lives near a town called Rovaniemi.

North Pole, Alaska, and Rovaniemi, Finland, are not far from the Arctic Circle. But the town of Santa Claus in southern Indiana is probably closer to the Equator than the real North Pole. Still the Indiana state highway map carries the notation: “Post Office famous for Christmas mail.”

The idea of mail postmarked at North Pole or Loveland got me thinking about other place names. I wondered if the post offices in the Cache Valley town of Paradise or the Ogden Valley town of Eden get requests to postmark mail because of the nature of their names.

They do.

“Once in a while,” postmistress Shirley Pearce in Paradise told me. The most notable example: a woman from Bountiful who brought in her wedding announcements to be mailed. “Everyone who gets an announcement will ask, ‘Who do I know in Paradise?’ ” the bride said.

Don Young, postmaster at Eden, said he sometimes hears from a collector who is trying to get postmarks from every place mentioned in the Bible. So the collector mails a letter to Eden to have it mailed back to him so he’ll have “Eden” on the postmark.

Next I began looking at the list of towns on the highway maps of some of our neighboring states to see what other interesting names there are.

I found we have no franchise: there’s an Eden in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Arizona, too! Wyoming and Idaho don’t have a Paradise, but Montana does, and Arizona has both Paradise and Paradise Valley.

You can have Liberty in Idaho, and Freedom in Wyoming, but to have a choice it takes Utah, where Liberty is in Weber County and Freedom in Sanpete.

Speaking of choice, within a few miles of each other in Weber County you can live in Plain City or Pleasant View, depending upon your aesthetic inclination, I guess — or which side of I-15 you prefer. Or if you really want it pleasant, come on down I-15 to the Pleasant Grove exit.

Whereas Utah requires three other states to make up its Four Corners, both Montana and Wyoming do it alone, with towns named that even though they aren’t even very close to any of the respective state’s corners.

Even though it’s a land-bound mountain state, Wyoming boasts an Atlantic City. And Wyoming seems a bit boastful with its Acme, its Superior and its Bar Nunn. It does have its more humble side, though, with a town called just plain Bill.

Frontier state that it is, you’d expect a lot of Forts in Montana, and it has five; but you’d hardly expect this state with no sea coast to have 13 places with Port in their name. Turns out they are ports of entry with the Canadian border, not sea ports.

And while on Montana names, there’s a Pray and a Wisdom. Maybe if you do the one, you get the other.

Our neighbors in Idaho have some interesting names. How do you get a Cape Horn in Idaho, as well as at the tip of South America? And Culdesac? Does that sound like a dead end town to live in or what?

Even though Idaho has a town named Small, it is really quite cosmopolitan with the same place names as some of the great cities of Europe such as Moscow, Paris, Geneva and Montpelier.

Idaho is very education conscious in its place names, too, with such famous universities as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Georgetown and Vassar represented.

Which brings to mind a man who grew up in southeastern Idaho and had worked in both education and printing. So he said that when he went to Germany as an LDS missionary, people there were quite impressed that so young a man had taught at Oxford and been an editor at the Paris Post.

Utah place names naturally often have origins from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are the Bible and Book of Mormon places, the Jerico, Abraham, Enoch, Benjamin and Ephraim, the Manti, Moroni, Nephi and Lehi.

There are the names from church and other pioneer leaders: Hinckley, Brigham City, Smithfield, Ballard, Woodruff, Kimball and Widtsoe junctions, Heber City and Willard, not to complete the list at all. And from Indian greats Panguitch, Santaquin, Tintic, Tabiona and Washakie.

You might think that Utah, home of the Saints, would have a lot of Saints. But there’s only St. George and St. John. Idaho, on the other hand, has four Saints, Montana has eight. And Arizona. It has four Saints (St. Johns, for example) plus 13 more if you count those in Spanish–(Santa Fe and San Miguel and others). Even Santa Clara, San-pete and San-dy don’t make Utah competitive in this race.

If there’s meaning in names, Arizona has an optimistic outlook, with places named Gladden, Carefree, Honeymoon and Hope. Maybe it’s all the sun that makes the outlook so bright — there are 12 towns with Sun in their names. But maybe there is one shadow as well — a shadow of a doubt, anyway. There’s a town named Why.

Utah likes to honor the presidents of the United States. Counties and towns are named for Washington (George), Garfield (James A.), Fillmore (a double mention with Millard), Roosevelt (Theodore), Cleveland (Grover), Monroe (James). Sources are not in agreement whether any of several Wilson locations are named for the president, but the town of Woodrow is.

Other names are there, but don’t refer to presidents: Adamsville (neither John nor John Quincy), Abraham (not Lincoln), Benjamin (not Harrison), Clinton (not Bill), Chester (not Arthur) and Warren (not Harding).

Utah language is maybe reflected in the town of Ophir (rude?).

States name towns to recognize borders. Since it’s on I-15, lots of people know about Monida, marking the border of Montana and Idaho, but few know of the out-of-the way Uvada and Ucolo in Utah, or Cal-Nev-Ari in the southern point of Nevada near those other two states, or Orvada on the northern border. OreIda? No, that’s potato products, not a town. Nevada’s generic Stateline is perhaps best for these border towns.

Considering ecclesiastical names, I couldn’t find a Heaven, but Oklahoma goes it one better with Heavener. And at least Utah has Providence.

On the other side of it, there’s Hell, and weathermen sometimes point out places that are colder than that rather cold Michigan town. Which reminds of the guy who said he’d always wanted to move to Montana and open a hand basket shop in Helena.

Then there’s the state of affairs idea: “Well”sville might have been the town to inspire the story about the town whose residents were so healthy that there had been only two deaths in a decade — the doctor and the undertaker, who both starved to death.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page E1.