Hey, it's Brian, and before we get started, just a quick note that this episode and the other five in this special series discuss Santa Claus, but not in a way that younger listeners could appreciate.

If there are little ones with an earshot, save this for later. Thanks.

The post office department has a thing called the dead letter office, and that's where all mail goes that cannot be delivered.

Since there is not a Santa Claus address that exists, all that mail was going to the dead letter office.

This is Nancy Pope from the Smithsonian's Postal History Museum, and you're hearing part of a conversation I had with her back in 2016 for an earlier episode of Christmas past.

There were postmasters who did not want to just send them to the dead letter office because at the dead letter office, they would get destroyed.

The function of the dead letter is to take a letter and try to get it to someone.

So if they have to, they open it to find another address, a sender or receiver, and then they send it on to somebody.

If there's nobody they can send it onto, it's destroyed.

What do you do when something like children writing letters to Santa Claus, something cute and

innocent, or in some cases desperate and heartbreaking? What do you do when it ends up becoming a

major problem for the people responsible for delivering those letters? Not just a logistical problem,

like where do you actually send a letter when it's addressed to the North Pole,

but also a public relations problem, because sending those letters to the dead letter office where they'd be destroyed just didn't sit too well with the public. So among other tactics,

the post office would hand some of the letters over to be published in the newspapers. But

members of the public didn't seem all that interested in getting involved. They just liked to be published in the newspapers. But members of the public didn't

seem all that interested in getting involved. They just liked reading the letters in the paper.

They would even do contests. They would put up four or five letters from kids and ask the writers,

which is the best letter, which is kind of like, you know, which is the most pitiful story,

but it was publicity.

Got people reading the papers.

Releasing the letters to the newspapers and the general public was a sort of on-again, off-again thing for a couple of years.

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