“Unveiling the Secret: The Surprising Destination of Santa’s Letters Revealed!”
As for the rest of the letters, as the Post Office didn’t deliver to the North Pole, these generally found their way to the dead letter office for further processing. As one article published in a 1906 edition of The Times noted, “The Christmas season has no charm for the prosaic employees of the Dead Letter Office. It means only a lot of extra work and bother for them.”
Now, as we’ve noted in our video What Happens to Undeliverable Mail with No Return Address?, normally, for example with the U.S. Postal Service’ dead letter office, they go to pretty extreme lengths to try to track down a recipient or return address for various undeliverable mail. This includes allowing their recovery clerks to open the letters or packages, making them the only individuals in the US legally allowed to open another real person’s mail without it being a federal crime. Noteworthy here, the postal service states over half of all dead mail eventually makes it to the recipient or back to the original sender. The problem with letters to Santa is that he is, shall we say, outside of their ability to deliver to. And, as such, they simply sorted the letters to Santa out and destroyed them.
However, this all began to change around the early 20th century, when certain charitable organizations started expressing interest in becoming Santa’s helpers via responding to these letters to Santa. And so it was that in 1907, Postmaster General George Meyer decided to allow postal centers, if they wanted, to give these letters to Santa to various organizations or people that wanted them for the purpose of fulfilling the requests in some of them. While, again, technically illegal to open someone else’s mail, when it comes to letters to Santa, nobody seemed intent on prosecuting anyone who opened these. However, because humans like to complain about every little change no matter how positive the intent, there was, nonetheless, considerable backlash about this after the fact. Thus, the following year, Postmaster General Meyer decided not to continue the experiment and the letters then were all funneled once again to the dead letter office and ultimately destroyed.
