North Pole aims to stop incursion by the Grinch

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Christmas may be more than a month away, but a group of Santa's "elves" is already at work trying to save a 55-year-old holiday tradition.

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 Claus, North Pole" each year. Replies come with North Pole postmarks.

People in North Pole are incensed by the changes, comparing 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 like Kris Kringle Drive. Volunteers in the letter program even sign the response letters as Santa's elves and helpers.

Gabby Gaborik, chief elf among several dozen volunteers, said he met with Postal Service officials this week to come up with an alternative.

He's now working with local government officials to get "101 Santa Claus Lane" as an address for his group, Santa's Mailbag. That way children will have a specific destination for their letters, allowing volunteers to run their own program and bypass stringent new rules implemented by the Postal Service after security issues arose in a similar program in Maryland last year.

Gaborik thinks his town's name gives the local effort more cachet than other destinations.

"The city was founded on the Christmas theme," he said Thursday. "This is our identity. This is North Pole, Alaska."

The North Pole program was

stymied by a tighter process put in place nationwide after a postal worker in Maryland recognized a volunteer with the agency's Operation Santa program as a registered sex offender. The worker intervened before the individual could answer a child's letter, but the agency viewed the scare as a reason to tighten security.

The Postal Service already had restricted its policies in such programs in 2006, including requiring volunteers to show identification. But the Maryland episode prompted more changes, such as barring volunteers from having access to children's last names and addresses. The Postal Service instead redacts that information from each letter and replaces the addresses with codes that match computerized addresses known only to the post office.

It's up to local managers to determine whether to go through the time-consuming effort, but the new restrictions must be applied if letter programs are continued. The restrictions don't affect privately run letter efforts.

The Postal Service decided this month to end the North Pole letter program, saying dealing with the tighter restrictions isn't feasible in Alaska. The agency considers the North Pole effort part of its giant Operation Santa program, although locals like to think of their program as unique.

"It's always been a good program, but we're in different times and concerned for the privacy of the information," said Anchorage-based agency spokeswoman Pamela Moody.

North Pole Mayor Doug Isaacson is outraged that locals just learned of the change. "It's Grinchlike that the Postal Service never informed all the little elves before the fact," he said.

Santa Claus House, a store that looks 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.

Store operations manager Paul Brown said his business also 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 still will be forwarded to volunteers. Those intercepted by the Postal Service probably will be shredded eventually.

Alaska's congressional delegation has stepped in to find a solution. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Democratic Sen. Mark Begich and Republican Rep. Don Young have sent letters to Postmaster General John Potter expressing their concerns over the changes.