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No More letters from Santa

Dr Dog

Sharks have a week dedicated to me
Veteran
Whats next??

Who has not ever gotten a letter from Santa. I still have one from when I was 8...yes 30 years ago

Why are our leaders killing everything that was fun


ANCHORAGE, Alaska — 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 that caution is necessary to protect children. But he’s outraged North Pole program should be affected by a sex offender’s actions on the East Coast — and he thinks it’s wrong that locals just found out about the change in recent days.

“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 additional 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 around the world can still send letters to Santa Claus. The Postal Service still runs the giant Operation Santa Program in which children around the world can have their letters to Santa answered, and the restrictions do not 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. 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 if they ask for it.

Another issue raising the hackles on some locals is separate recent change. Anchorage — 260 miles (400 kilometres) to the south — is now processing the thousands of requests for North Pole postal cancellation marks on Christmas cards and packages from outside the state. It’s a job long handled by nearby Fairbanks, about 15 miles (24 kilometres) away.

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.

:fsu:
 

CANNACO-OP

Farmassist
Veteran
Legalize and problem solved... .000000001% of the revenue could fund a Santa program no problem, and leave the other 99.9+ percent to solve the rest of their problems..
 
this is horrible. plain and simple.

its like telling all the children of todays generation, "Look, we were just bullshitting you anyway. Nothing is ever what it seems to be. Better you learn that now."

every child should be a child. this is just one more thing in a long line that is going to make kids grow up faster than they should.

...and people wonder why elementary school students bring guns to schools. these kids today are just growing up WAAAAY too fast.


i may be alone in this, but this is how i feel. i had a childhood, and i enjoyed it. too many kids today dont have that luxury.
 

Lil 'o Me

Farm hand
Veteran
I never even knew a program like this was around. Thats so cute! I hope its still around when my son is old enouph to start writing letters. Why don't they just do back ground checks on the "Santa's Healpers"? That should keep them damn sex offenders outta there.
 

whiterabbit9

Active member
Veteran
Legalize and problem solved... .000000001% of the revenue could fund a Santa program no problem, and leave the other 99.9+ percent to solve the rest of their problems..

seems like legalization is the solution to all of the world's problems
 

unclefishstick

Fancy Janitor
ICMag Donor
Veteran
im sorry but this is funny,if you've ever been to north pole village,its no surprise at all its packed full of molesters (or just one),i mean really,who volunteers to have kids sit in their lap all day?maybe this is a sign we need to re think the paradigm of xmas,bring back the actual giving part of christmas and not all the ads and greed,not what do I want,but what can I give?
 

whiterabbit9

Active member
Veteran
I think it was a great idea, + it was run with volunteers

but at same time...

hmmm

what does christmas give / santa claus

I guess children think of an imaginary being, magic

but then they realize it wasn't true hmmm
 

Dr Dog

Sharks have a week dedicated to me
Veteran
I beleieved in Santa alot longer than I did any of the other Jokes( easter bunny, Jesus, the great pumpkin)
 

Stoner4Life

Medicinal Advocate
ICMag Donor
Veteran
I beleieved in Santa alot longer than I did any of the other Jokes( easter bunny, Jesus, the great pumpkin)
I was just 4 or 5 years old when we were at Easter Sunday mass way back when, of course before we left the house for church either mom or dad pulled out the Easter baskets and set them up so that me & my sister would discover that the Easter bunny had visited our home while we were gone.

We come pulling into the driveway and just 15 feet from our front door sat a great big cotton tail rabbit, my eyes went wide with amazement and the 'reality' of the Easter bunny was firmly cemented in sugar laced demented dreams for quite awhile.......


 

Dr Dog

Sharks have a week dedicated to me
Veteran
lol, very funny

kind of like when i looked under my bed everynight for about ten years after seeing Friday the 13th
 

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