Santa menaced by sex offender postie The US Postal Service has pulled the plug on a Santa Claus letter service which has run since 1954. Thousands of letters sent by children around the world to "Santa Claus, North Pole" were opened by volunteers and replies written and sent. Envelopes were returned with a North Pole postmark. [The North Pole in question is in …
LOL well I this has brightened kids Christmas, good going over reacting peons!
Chances of predatory paedophile finding an address and deciding mmmm this child sounds delicious I shall go and rape. Very close to zero.
vs
Making a child happy upon receiving a message from Santa. Very close to 100%
Well, obviously they picked the correct option!
This is just so sad, and so now aswell as not being able to go and see Santa you can't send him a letter, which is the most magical thing about Christmas in my opinion - getting that letter back from actual Santa.
The comment 'in different times' - yup we live in paranoid times where nobody is to be trusted as we now cannot write and receive a letter from someone we will never meet.
... parents not willing to take the risk could just tell their kids they will post it for them and do the reply themselves... those willing to accept the minute chance of have little johnny fiddled with, use the non-anonymous service that has been provided since the 1950's.
And the guy quoted saying "we live in different times"... no, we really don't, you just think you do - pedo's arn't a creation of the 00's, they were here long before then, as was privacy intrusion, the difference is that the people who ran it and those who used it, were all willing to give out or use this information to perpetuate a lie for the kids. Don't blame the times just because you're scared of being bum-raped by lawyers! :)
oh noes! a child's address has been compromised! ... .... .... could one just not ... walk down a street, find a house with a christmas tree "santa please stop here" sign and have about 75% (taking grandparents into account, who inevitably have to play along and do this) chance of a child living in the house. the more effort put into the display the younger the child.
Knowing what the child wants and address gains no favours for the peado, every child will evidently want a pony/playstation/most-over-marketed-sex-appropriate-toy-on-tv.
"The US Postal Service has pulled the plug on a Santa Claus letter service which has run since 1954."
not the same as
"So the Operation Santa Program will still work, but those letters with the North Pole mark won't be handled by volunteers in the town."
but of course all the previous commenters read only the first two paragraphs and go straight to bitching and moaning about how our liberties are being infringed and Christmas is ruined forever. The only actual difference is that one town has decided that their postal workers can't keep up with the concept of a reference to an address being replaced with an address. Not newsworthy and certainly not worth reacting like a Faily Express reader about it.
This presumably means by admitting the tiny chance that someone might get hold of the address, they're opening themselves to massive law suits (this being America) from all the parents and kids who wrote to Santa throughout the last 50 years....just in case one or two of those were opened by rather dodgy characters in an American backwater town.
Also sounds like this system blocks the address being known, but doesn't check the content of the letter? Erm, aren't we always being told to check what our kids read and who they talk to in case they get enticed to contact strangers?
As for why they're all panicing about it - this is Alaska, home of Sarah Palin who makes George Bush and co. look fairly un-paranoid.
Santa is, in a way, a religion. A faith-based "god" that is all-knowing and watches you. Culture after culture has come up with the same concept. "Be good, because a great and powerful being is watching you, even when no mortal is, and there will be a reckoning."
At a young age, you get told it was all a lie. Isn't that messed up? At age 6 or so, you discover that something you took to be true was not only a lie, but a carefully maintained conspiracy perpetrated upon you by the entire adult world. Millions are involved in the conspiracy, as are major corporations and the press.
And people wonder why the youth of America are cynical.
-Andy T Weir
All parents and many aunts and uncles know the truth.
Santa is real - very real, and in fact precisely as real and easy to track down as Spartacus
These unbelievers who knock up straw-Santa's in order to be able to knock them down miss the point entirely.
There is Santa, I've seen him.
"75% (taking grandparents into account, who inevitably have to play along and do this) chance of a child living in the house. the more effort put into the display the younger the child."
That's a pretty sick inverse proportion you've just suggested, but I applaud the mathematics. It's y=10/x where x is the effort from 1-10 giving y the age of the child.
My son recieved his first santa letter this week, I'm in the UK... the letter was addressed to him, and it didn't say who it had came from or where from - just Santa.
A quick google search, and it's turned out it was an NSPCC service... evidently it must have been a friend that gave our sons details to them for this free santa letter.. I think.
He's 7 months old... having I think I prefer the US child-opts-in version than the completely anonymous "we know you have a child, now try to figure out who we are and who else knew!" system the nspcc seem to be running! lol
Not being a daily mail reader - I'm sure my son is safe... for the minute.
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