Anchorage will be the new North Pole.
The Postal Service receives hundreds of thousands of requests for the special postmark from around the world, Postal Service spokesman Ernie Swanson said.
The requests, often a package of stamped Christmas cards, were previously handled in Fairbanks, which is 14 miles from the Christmas-themed town of North Pole.
“It’s gotten to be a very labor intensive exercise for the office in Fairbanks,” Swanson said. “In Anchorage, we have more personnel and more automated machinery that can do it.”
The Postal Service announced the change this week, and it’s drawn criticism from the North Pole mayor.
“It’s ridiculous,” Mayor Doug Isaacson said.
Isaacson said people forward their holiday mail to Alaska with the expectation the cards and letters will be postmarked in North Pole, “where the spirit of Christmas lives year round,” according to the town motto.
To postmark them in Anchorage is misleading, Isaacson said.
“At least Fairbanks isn’t that far away,” he said.
The North Pole postmark will continue to be made on mail carried to the North Pole post office, Swanson said.
Requests by mail for the postmark must be made by Dec. 15 in order to ensure delivery by Christmas, according to a Postal Service statement.
The holiday mail should be addressed, stamped, placed in a larger envelope and addressed to North Pole Holiday Cancellation at 4141 Postmark Drive in Anchorage. The ZIP code is 99530-9998.
Swanson said other cities attract Christmas mail, including Santa, Idaho, and Snowflake, Ariz.
It's like a black hole sucking everything in...
This garbage is all PC government worker tripe intended to cut down on flow.
If JC himself was president, this would have happened.
Now we all know that the organized news has been having a lot of problems with facts, but this is too much.
Never let it be said that here is no solution that the government can't invent a problem for.
This message corrects the previous message clipped by the DNM 'bot
oh and fix the 'bot willya?
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-11-19-north-pole-santa-letter_N.htm
Wonder why this wasn't mentioned in the article...
Didn't a post mark... use to be somekind of record.. or somekind of proof of "something". NOW a postmark means nothing... I hope the IRS will understand when Santa's mail is postmarked from the moon!! and hundreds of years late!!
LIES, LIES, LIES.. This is what we want to teach our future generations?
http://www.facebook.com/SantaLettersForNorthPoleAK?ref=mf
Used to be a letter dropped off at the North Pole post office would arrive in a PO box (about 50 feet away) that afternoon or get delivered the next day for home delivery. Today that same letter is bagged up, trucked to Anchorage, sorted in Anchorage, trucked back to Fairbanks, sorted, trucked to North Pole, sorted, and delivered 3-4 days later. 3-4 days to travel 50 feet is not progress, efficient, or cost effective.
What the postal service needs to do is fire some of the Anchorage excess staff they obviously have and hire new staff in Fairbanks, North Pole, and modernize the equipment at these two facilities.
I would expect the mayor to look at the situation a bit deeper than the average bear.