Starry-eyed children writing letters to
the jolly man at the North Pole this holiday season likely won't
get a response from Santa Claus or his helpers.
The U.S. Postal Service is dropping a popular national program
begun in 1954 in the small Alaska town of North Pole, where
volunteers open and respond to thousands of letters addressed to
Santa each year. Replies come with North Pole postmarks.
Last year, a postal worker in Maryland recognized an Operation
Santa volunteer there as a registered sex offender. The postal
worker interceded before the individual could answer a child's
letter, but the Postal Service viewed the episode as a big enough
scare to tighten rules in such programs nationwide.
People in North Pole are incensed by the change, likening the
Postal Service to the Grinch trying to steal Christmas. The letter
program is a revered holiday tradition in North Pole, where light
posts are curved and striped like candy canes and streets have
names such as Kris Kringle Drive and Santa Claus Lane. Volunteers
in the letter program even sign the response letters as Santa's
elves and helpers.
North Pole Mayor Doug Isaacson agreed caution is necessary to
protect children. But he's outraged North Pole's program should be
affected by a sex offender's actions on the East Coast - and he
thinks it's wrong that locals just learned of the change.
"It's Grinchlike that the Postal Service never informed all the
little elves before the fact," he said. "They've been working on
this for how long?"
The Postal Service began restricting its policies in such
programs in 2006, including requiring volunteers to show
identification.
But the Maryland incident involving the sex offender prompted
more changes, even forcing the agency to briefly suspend the
Operation Santa program last year in New York and Chicago.
The agency now prohibits volunteers from having access to
children's family names and addresses, said spokeswoman Sue
Brennan. The Postal Service instead redacts the last name and
addresses on each letter and replaces the addresses with codes that
match computerized addresses known only to the post office - and
leaves it up to individual post offices if they want to go through
the time-consuming effort to shield the information.
Anchorage-based agency spokeswoman Pamela Moody said dealing
with the tighter restrictions is not feasible in Alaska.
"It's always been a good program, but we're in different times
and concerned for the privacy of the information," she said.
Moody stressed that kids can still send letters to Santa Claus.
The Postal Service still runs the giant Operation Santa Program in
which children can have their letters to Santa answered, and the
restrictions do not affect privately run letter efforts.
What will change are the generically addressed letters to
"Santa Claus, North Pole" that for years have been forwarded to
the Alaska town. That program will stop, unless changes are made
before Christmas.
Losing the Santa-letter cache is a blow to the community of
2,100 people, who pride themselves on their Christmas ties. Huge
tourist attractions here include an everything-Christmas store,
Santa Claus House, and the post office, where visitors can get a
hand-stamped postmark on their postcards and packages.
Another issue raising the hackles on some locals is another
recent change. Anchorage - 260 miles to the south - is processing
the thousands of out-of-state requests for North Pole postal
cancellation marks on Christmas cards and packages; Fairbanks, just
15 miles away, had long done so.
Moody said with as many as 800,000 items processed last year,
Fairbanks is not equipped to handle the overload. Anchorage is the
only city in Alaska with the high-speed equipment necessary to do
the job without delay. Moody disagreed with the mayor's belief that
the process creates a false postmark.
Santa Claus House, built like a Swiss chalet and chock full of
all items Christmas, sells more than 100,000 letters from Santa and
one of the lures is the postmark.
Operations manager Paul Brown believes his business will be
affected under changes to the volunteer Santa letter program
because tens of thousands of letters are addressed to Santa Claus
House, North Pole, Alaska.
Those letters will still be forwarded to volunteers but it's
unclear yet if anything will be done with them. Those intercepted
by the postal service will probably eventually be shredded.
Brown worries about misinterpretations of the changes, such as
people believing it's no longer possible to get individual pieces
of mail graced with the North Pole postmark.