Associated Press photographs
Santa Claus, also known as Patrick Farmer, holds up letters to St. Nick at the Santa Claus House in North Pole, Alaska. The U.S. Postal Service, citing privacy concerns after a registered sex offender was found to be answering children's letters, says generically addressed letters to "Santa Claus, North Pole" will no longer be forwarded to volunteers in the Alaska town as had been done since 1954.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 person 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 Grinch-like 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. Changes included 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.
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