Santa Claus is coming to town
If it’s the holiday season, it means that Santa Claus is going to pay a visit so all the good boys and girls can tell them what they want for Christmas.
On Saturday, he and Mrs. Claus will visit the Cape Coral Main Post Office at 1030 S.E. 9th Ave. from 10 a.m. to noon.
Kitty Swanson, who is organizing the event, said it’s a good time for the children to have pictures taken with him and tell him what they want, if they haven’t written their letter yet.
“We’re going to e-mail the pictures to the parents so they can create holiday cards, and we’re going to have a crafts table set up for the kids to make a decoration,” said Swanson, who is running the event for the first time.
The event has been going on for many years, and not just in the Cape, but nationally. It started simply as a way of doing something good for the community for the holidays, Swanson said.
“The whole idea is that the post office has been getting all the Santa letters for about 100 years, so what we try to do is to answer the letters,” Swanson said. “We have a group here that handles that.”
The kids can bring their letters to Santa and place them in a special mailbox, with a response back from the North Pole if they give a return address.
This is the Letters for Santa program, which is one of two special holiday programs the post office offers.
The other is Operation Santa, where the post office gets people to adopt a family that may not have the ability to buy gifts for their children this season.
Swanson said it goes hand-in-hand with the letters program.
“Letters that were written for Santa are shared with benefactors, who apply to sponsor the letter without knowing the address or names,” Swanson said. “They can get the items the child has requested and bring them to the post office and mail them to the person who wrote the letter.”
Swanson said there were 68 done last year.