The Whole Neighborhood Is Looking for Santa. Don’t Tell the Kids.

“昨年에 YEAR서 今年에도 $$AN他 행444를.”

Pause for a moment and try saying it aloud. The Korean sentence starts to emerge: “After last year’s Santa event, we’re doing it again this year.” The characters aren’t scrambled by a computer error. The adults looking for Santa volunteers made the notice hard to read on purpose.

The notice, featured in Korean news reports on November 3, came from an apartment complex in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province. It was looking for residents to help with a Christmas event. Even the headline, “$$AN他 毛ZIP,” makes you work to read the Korean words for “Santa wanted.” A passing adult gets a small decoding challenge, too.

Once you know the trick, the text begins to make sense. Some English words stand for their meaning, others for their sound. Chinese characters interrupt the Korean lettering, and numbers lend their pronunciation to the sentence. Most notices are edited to be easier to read. This one only works if it takes a little effort.

The reason is written at the bottom. The organizers wanted to keep children who could read from discovering what was being planned. Residents who needed the plain-language version were directed to the apartment announcements. Even adults who couldn’t crack the code had somewhere to turn.

You can see the care that went into the event before Santa even appears. Someone had to sit down with an ordinary call for volunteers and decide which characters to replace, where to add English, and where to slip in a number. Writing the notice had already become part of the Christmas game.

The post sharing the notice urged anyone who could read it to pretend they hadn’t. Decoding, it turns out, is only one of the qualifications. You also have to walk past a child without giving anything away. This Santa has a job before delivering the presents: keeping the recruitment notice a secret.