NATIONAL: North Pole To Send Coal To Kids

You might have sent a letter to Santa Claus at the North Pole when you were a child. Times have changed, and a popular program in Alaska is ending, at the behest of the U.S. Postal Service.

The USPS is dropping a popular national program begun in 1954 at its office in North Pole, Alaska. volunteers would open and respond to thousands of letters addressed to Santa each year. Replies come complete with North Pole postmarks.

You might assume it’s because the USPS is losing money, and the program is expensive. While that might be true, you’d be wrong.

However, an incident in Maryland, far away from Alaska, is ending that program. Last year, a Maryland postal worker recognized an Operation Santa volunteer as a registered sex offender. The postal worker stopped the volunteer before he could answer a child’s letter, but the USPS has tightened rules in such programs nationwide.

The instituted changes include the following: volunteers are prohibited from having direct access to children’s last names and addresses, which are instead redacted from each letter and replaced with codes that match computerized addresses known only to the USPS. It is up to individual post offices to determine if they want to participate in the program, due to the extra expense and time.

Read more HERE.