Postal Service halts program that brought flood of letters to Santa to North Pole, Alaska

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.

Many in North Pole are incensed by the change, which they didn't see coming.

"It's Grinchlike that the Postal Service never informed all the little elves before the fact," said Mayor Doug Isaacson. "They've been working on this for how long?"

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 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.

Isaacson agreed that caution is necessary to protect children. But he's outraged that 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.

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 before reinstating it with the same restrictions implemented nationwide this year.

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. It leaves it up to local managers if they want to go through the time-consuming effort to shield the information.

Brennan said no one is barred from continuing their programs, but they have to comply with the rules.

Anchorage-based Postal Service spokeswoman Pamela Moody points out 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, although Brennan said only a fraction of the letters with no specific address wind up in the Alaska town anyway. 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.