Some post offices around the country allow volunteers to pick up children's letters to Santa, read them and send something from the list to the child. This program was temporarily halted this week in New York when a letter carrier recognized one of the "Secret Santas" as a registered sex offender.
Rather than scrap the program, New York will resume it tomorrow, but will black out identifying information from children and assign each one a number so that the Santas can drop the gifts at the post office to be sent to the children from there.
I know it's important to be careful with children's security, and having never heard of this kind of program before, I was a little surprised that strangers were being given letters with children's names and addresses and specific gift requests. But I'm glad the post office found a way to maintain the spirit of the program without giving in to undue hysteria. And just for the record, no known harm was done to any child in this incident. It was simply decided that precaution would be best.
Letter to Santa: FailureMagazine.com
