Chattanooga: Postal workers ‘help’ Santa with letters
Santa has some pretty high expectations to meet.
Just in the Chattanooga area, children have asked for their own personal elf, a girlfriend for daddy and plenty of puppies in addition to more conventional presents like Hannah Montana gear and video games.
“We’ve actually gotten one saying, ‘Don’t bring my brother anything; he doesn’t deserve anything,’” said Judy Mahaffey, customer service supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service General Mail Facility on Shallowford Road.
Ms. Mahaffey and two other postal service workers in Chattanooga are deputized as elves every Christmas when bundles of letters addressed to the North Pole with backward letters and drawn-on postage stamps start coming in.
“We’re Santa’s helpers. We make sure he gets his letters and make sure he gets the responses back,” she said.
Some of the letters written to Santa are repentant: One writer swore to never play with matches again if he could only have one particular gift.
Others are more demanding.
“He said, ‘Bring that fat boy or don’t come at all,’” Ms. Mahaffey said of one letter writer.
At times the letters tug at heart strings. Last year a letter came telling Santa the writer had been really, really good this year and beged him to not forget her — like he did the year before.
“They’re funny, they’re touching and some of them are actually sad,” Ms. Mahaffey said.
Ms. Mahaffey and others receive about 300 to 700 letters to Santa and see to it that those with return addresses get responses.
Debbie Birchfield, a clerk in Ms. Mahaffey’s office who helps with the letters, said the letters come in year-round. They’ve already gotten a letter written to the Easter Bunny for next year.
“You’ll get one here and there all year,” she said. “You wouldn’t think they’d even be thinking about Christmas in April.”
The writers use crayons, markers, pencil and drawing or stickers when words fail to get their point across. Some even include packets of sunflower seeds for the reindeer.
“You can tell the ones that are like 2 or 3 (years old),” said Rhonda Layne, the plant manager’s secretary who helps with the letters. “There are a lot of zeros.”
It’s usually easy to tell where the writers intended for their letters to go — whether it’s addressed to Santa, HoHo or simply the North Pole.
“We’re pretty sure that’s to Santa,” said Ms. Mahaffey, holding a letter with two Christmas trees, a big S and several illegible letters penciled on it.
Sometimes parents might wish the letters were a little less readable, according to Ms. Mahaffey who guessed parents didn’t read some of the letters. One of the letters asked for Santa to take care of the writer’s mother who had just “had surgery on her private part.”
“I think if parents knew what some of these letters said they’d be mortified,” Ms. Mahaffey said.
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