Santas stage summer Christmas Olympics in Copenhagen

Young Santa Claus assistants wave during the parade on the first day of the annual World Santa Claus Congress north of Copenhagen.

COPENHAGEN (AFP) - Santa Clauses from around the world convened in Copenhagen this week for their annual mid-summer Christmas Games, involving three days of snow boot racing and clambering up and down chimneys, a discipline they hope soon will become an Olympic sport.

"During the congress we will be staging our very own Christmas-in-July Olympic games, the main disciplines being climbing chimneys and snow boot races, the sort of thing we normally get up to in our high season in December," Kurt Fleming, a Danish circus clown who doubles as president of the World Santa Congress, told AFP.

"We want to see this noble art granted full Olympic status. It's too late for Athens now but we want to see the chimney clambering discipline at the Beijing Olympics in four years' time and we are looking into the possibility of getting reindeer sleigh-riding accepted at the Winter Olympics."

The congress, taking place in Copenhagen's lush Deer Park, is the 41st of its kind, and brings together Santas from all over Europe and from such countries as Canada, the United States, Japan, Venezuela and El Salvador.

Among the 150 Father Christmases gathered for this year's games were also newcomers from Russia and Estonia, while Finland's long-time participant was sadly missing -- for political reasons, according to Fleming.

"Finland is not sending anyone this year. They refuse to recognize the fact that the true Santa Claus can only come from Greenland, Denmark's icebound Arctic province," he said.

"The Finns insist that the only real Santa is their own, so we have had to excommunicate him. There is only one real Santa Claus, the Santa Claus of Greenland, but the Finns won't accept that," he added.

While Greenland hosts an entertainment-laden Santa centre and runs a postal service processing letters from children all over the world addressed to "Father Christmas c/o North Pole", Finland operates a spectacular Santa Claus Village and Christmas theme park in Rovaniemi on the Polar Circle, visited by more than half a million tourists every year

During Denmark's Christmas-in-July jamboree, the Santas, accompanied by bevies of elves and goblins, perform open air Christmas shows, go for their annual paddle in the Baltic Sea at nearby Bellevue Beach and stage a parade through the centre of Copenhagen, ending in the city's Town Hall Square.

"Two special chimney stacks will be put up in the square and teams of Santas will have to show their prowess in scaling them with sacks of presents on their backs," Fleming said. "Quite a test on a hot summer day."

The event culminates on Wednesday with the crowning of the "Santa of the Year" -- usually a local personality involved in children's charity work -- before the Santas adjourn for a traditional Danish Christmas dinner of roast pork and crackling, red cabbage and caramelized potatoes followed by rice pudding -- heavy fare in the stifling midsummer heat.

Also on the congress agenda are such thorny issues as working conditions, standardising the date for Christmas and setting slimming regimes for overweight Santas.

"Spain insists on holding Christmas on January 6th, Epiphany, the Dutch a month before that, while we celebrate it on December 24 and other countries on December 25. We want to see a bit of EU-harmonisation here," Fleming said. "Another problem is the growing obesity of Father Christmases, many of whom weigh over 100 kilos. We must have slimmer Santas in the future if we want to take part in the Olympic Games," he insisted.