SACRAMENTO, CA — Every year thousands of letters addressed to Santa Claus make their way to Sacramento area post offices. Those letters eventually find their way to Santa’s main postal station at 2000 Royal Oaks Drive in Sacramento.

This is the 26th year that the Sacramento Post Office has become Santa central in helping children get their mail to Santa. Letter writers, most of them children, and an increasing number of adults down on their luck, have taken a pen and crafted a letter to Santa.

The Postal Service’s “Dear Santa” station is staffed by a core of postal employees who parcel out letters to individuals and organizations who want to help.

As in years past, the Postal Service has implemented a restricted information policy in the 2013 program. The procedure involves having postal employees open and scan each letter, redact (conceal) any personal information, make copies and log in each letter, assigning it a number. The letters are then put in a file, where they can be reviewed by customers and if the customer chooses to answer a letter, they bring the purchased gifts back to the post office and pay for the mailing. Postal workers then match their number with the number on the letter generating a mailing label from the original letter. The customer never sees any of the personal information.

‘Dear Santa’ station is located at the Sacramento Post Office at 2000 Royal Oaks Drive, Sacramento.  Along with the “Dear Santa” program, you will find a full service Post Office that will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday.  The ‘Dear Santa’ station will end at 5 PM on Friday, December 19th, 2013.

ALERT:  For photo opportunity and/or letters to be read on the air or for print, contact Cindy Weight at 916-533-8881.

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Please Note: For broadcast quality video and audio, photo stills and other media resources, visit the USPS Newsroom at http://about.usps.com/news/welcome.htm.

For reporters interested in speaking with a regional Postal Service public relations professional, please go to http://about.usps.com/news/media-contacts/usps-local-media-contacts.pdf.

A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation: 152 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes. The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. With more than 31,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $65 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world's mail. If it were a private-sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 42nd in the 2012 Fortune 500. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency for seven years and the fourth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.

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