Secret Santa Security Snafu

Shannon LC Cate — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:02:00 GMT

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

XBox Writes Santa Letter for Your Kids

JeanneSager — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:06:00 GMT

Vista may not be Microsoft's biggest flub of the year. Hard to believe, I know, but a form letter generator for kids begging for their XBox this holiday might just beat the blue screen of death bombing operating system for the Worst Attempt At Being Useful Award.

To help convince doubting Thomases and Thomasinas that life without an XBox is a fate worse than having Mom pick them up from school in her PJs and curlers, Microsoft is letting kids choose their words from multiple choice drop-down menus. The XBox site lets them pick a recipient, a holiday (Festivus is on there for you Seinfeld fans), a means of celebration and list of four Microsoft products (talk about a monopoly). It even lets them clue you in on why they really deserve your major cash investment - ie. they've been "oder-free" all year long.

Ralphie's ode to his Red Rider BB gun this isn't. The results of my husband taking a spin to convince me he really needs an XBox (sadly, he's only half joking!) were amusing in that Mad Libs kind of way. But if one of these came from a kid, I'd be tempted to send them back to the drawing board to write a proper Santa letter one hundred times. Sorry kiddo, if you can't summon the passion to write your own letter, Mommy can't summon the $200-something it would take to bring home one of those babies.

On second thought, let 'em "write" it. A half-assed attempt on their part should earn them a half-assed attempt at holiday shopping, right? Coal it is.

Image: XBox (the husband's attempt at humor)

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