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Nov 19, 2009 4:45 pm US/Eastern
USPS Ends Santa Claus Letter Program
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
Since 1954, children who have mailed a letter to "Santa Claus, North Pole" saw their letters sent to the small town of North Pole, Alaska. The letter writers got a response from Santa or his helpers in North Pole, Alaska. However, the program is no more as the U.S. Postal Service is cancelling the program starting this year.
The Postal Service said kids around the world can still send their letters to Santa Claus. It will continue to run the Operation Santa program where children around the world can have their letters to Santa answered by volunteers around the country. The restrictions don't affect private organizations running their own letter efforts.
But what will change are the generically addressed letters to "Santa Claus, North Pole" that for years have been forwarded to volunteers in the Alaska town of North Pole. That program will stop, unless changes are made before Christmas.
The catalyst for the change was an incident last year in Maryland. A postal worker recognized an Operation Santa volunteer as a registered sex offender. The postal worker stopped the sex offender from answering the child's letter, but the USPS said the incident was a big enough scare to tighten rules for the program across the nation.
The Postal Service has sought to limit access to programs like this before. USPS started restricting its policies for some programs in 2006, including requiring volunteers to show identification before being allowed to respond to letters. But after the incident in Maryland, additional changes were called for which even forced the agency to briefly suspend the Operation Santa program last year in New York and Chicago.
The USPS now prohibits volunteers from having access to children's family names and addresses and instead redacts the last name and address on each letter. It replaces the addresses with codes that match computerized addresses known only to the post office.
So it will become tougher to get that North Pole, Alaska return address from now on. Residents in North Pole are upset about the cancellation.
"The school children of North Pole Elementary and North Pole Middle School (Santa's helpers) get the joy each year of replying to the letters sent here, a tradition that has gone on for a long time," North Pole resident Chris Storhok said. Storhok said the kids are "crushed that there will not be a response campaign this year."
(© 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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