Bad Tidings in North Pole, Alaska

It is a Monday in late October and I'm standing inside a smoke-filled shop in the tiny Alaskan town of North Pole, population 1,600. This shop sells only two things: cigarettes and Lotto scratchcards. Chain-smoking gamblers sit at the counter and demolish mountains of scratchcards. They have names like Royal Jackpot, Blame It On Rio and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It's a pretty desperate place.

Outside, people are going about their business on Frosty Avenue. Friends are chatting on Kris Kringle Drive. A gang of hoodies are slouched against the candy-cane striped streetlights on Santa Claus Lane, having just emerged from the Christmas-themed McDonald's. Everything in North Pole is Christmas-themed. Itis Christmas Day 365 days a year. The decorations are always up. It never stops being Christmas here. Never. Wherever you are in the world, if you write a letter to Santa, and address it simply "Santa, North Pole", your letter will most likely end up in this tiny Alaskan town.

Actually, specifically, your Santa letter will end up right here, in this smoke-filled scratchcard and cigarette shop. It's late October, and boxes of them are already piled up on the counter near the fruit machine. They're automatically forwarded here from the post office. I pick up an envelope at random. It has only one word scrawled on it, in a child's handwriting: "Santa." It's postmarked Doncaster.

I get talking to Debbie who works here, selling scratchcards to the gamblers. Debbie is herself achain-smoker, a blousy strawberry-blonde with a tough, good-looking face. She says she can frequently be found alone in here in floods of tears having opened yet another heartbreaker. "Just before you got here," she says, "I opened one that said, 'Dear Santa. All I want for Christmas is for my mother and father to stop shouting at each other.' I just fell apart."

"We get a lot of, 'Could you bring my father back from Iraq?' " says Gaby, the shop's owner.

I open another one at random. The kid wants an Xbox. And then I feel terrible that some child wrote to Santa, posted it off into the great unknown, and who opened it? Me. Non-magical me.

Debbie answers as many Santa letters as she can, whenever she gets a break. She writes back using her elf name: Twinkle. And she has help. Each week in November and December, a box of Santa letters is sent over to the nearby Middle School where the town's 11- and 12-year-olds - the sixth graders - write back in the guise of elves. It is part of the curriculum.

But there's something else - something bad. Six of last year's Middle School elves, now aged 13, were arrested back in April for being in the final stages of plotting a mass murder, a Columbine-style school shooting. The information is sketchy, but apparently they had elaborate diagrams and codenames and lists of the kids they were going to kill. I've come to North Pole to investigate the plot. What turned those elves bad? Were they serious? Was the town just too Christmassy? I need to tread carefully. So far I've only tried to ask one person about it - James, the waiter in Pizza Hut - and it went down badly.

"North Pole is the greatest place I've ever been," James told me as he poured my coffee. "The people here are always ready to do! We stay on track and we move on forward! We don't let anything get us down. That's the spirit of North Pole and the spirit of Christmas."

"I heard about the thing with the kids plotting a Columbine-style massacre," I said.

At this, James let out a noise the likes of which I've never really heard before. It was a heart-wrenching "Aaaaaah". He sounded like a balloon being burst, with all the joy escaping from him like air. "That was a, uh, shock..." he said.

"You have to wonder why..." I said.

"This is a very happy, cheerful, cheery place," said James. "Anything more you need?"

"No," I said.

And James walked back to the counter, shooting me a sad look, as if to say, "What kind of a grinch are you to bring that up?"

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