Every letter addressed to Santa Claus is technically undeliverable and therefore slated for destruction. Bummer. We set out to fix that.
We worked with the USPS to sift through the staggering volume of mail for letters addressed to Santa, and then built an online platform for people to read and respond to these letters. We also set up an elegant and unprecedented logistics system within USPS to mail gifts anonymously, preserving the magic for both sender and receiver.*
Thousands of letters were adopted the day we launched the project, and by the third day they had all been snapped up. The gifts started pouring in shortly after.
Operation Santa was launched in NYC in 2017—and it runs until today, in every city in America. It’s been a platform for aid during disasters like Hurricane Maria and the California wildfires, the subject of an IFC Films documentary, and it remains the only saintly thing I’ll ever do in my lifetime.
Operation Santa’s still running, with over 45,000 letters adopted—and counting.
*We did a lot more than that, of course. Some of the feats we pulled off include rifling through years and years of dusty letters in the back room of the James A. Farley Post Office in Manhattan, sobbing at their contents, figuring out how to redact personal identifying information from letters that were already deeply personal, tracking down an ultra-secure third party to handle redaction and scanning, writing the entire website, writing another staff-only website (the North Pole Console) for quality assurance—i.e. checking the letters were legible, properly labeled, and redacted, writing manuals for USPS employees and volunteers on how to use the North Pole Console, writing a slew of promotional materials like flyers and desk standees for on-ground events where people could come read letters and send gifts from local post offices, writing the case study video, etc.