By Christmas Day, postal officials expect to have as many as 250,000 letters from underprivileged children asking Santa for clothing and toys. Operation Santa Claus expects to receive up to 250,000 letters from needy kids this holiday season. Swenson said this was her forth year participating in Operation Santa. One letter came from Daisy, who asked for a microphone because she was tired of singing into a mop handle. He was quickly won over by her request, though, which was simply to help poor kids.
Volunteers are able to sort through the thousands of letter, looking for ones they want to answer.
The program was launched 71 years ago, when city postal workers began answering the requests to Santa that wound up in the Dead Letter Office instead of the North Pole. Thanks to publicity in newspapers and on local television, the program has grown into a large-scale charity drive, and the largest such program in the country, officials said. Last year, the post office received 232,000 letters, mostly from needy children and their families. Officials expect even more this year. They say they run the names on the letters through a computer database, to catch children hoping to collect more than once.