Yes, letters mailed to Santa need postage

PORTLAND, Ore. — Christmas is about a month away, which means it’s just about the right time to get letters to Santa into the mail — after all, it’s a long way to the North Pole.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) picks up hundreds of thousands of letters to Santa every year, and the agency recommends making sure any letters are sent off by Dec. 9. But if the postal service is involved, that raises another question: Do these letters need stamps?

It’s been a point of contention this year; there have been a handful of recent social media posts and comments, particularly on Reddit, that seem to imply that letters to Santa used to be free, but there was a change in policy this year to start requiring postage.

Viewer Paula Leach saw a Reddit post like that, but said she remembers her kids being able to write to Santa without a stamp years ago. She reached out to see if we could VERIFY the rules.

Do letters mailed to Santa require a stamp, and is that a new requirement?

Yes, letters mailed to Santa do need postage, and the requirement has been in place for years.

USPS has a specific program for Santa letters called Operation Santa. The program’s website spells out clear instructions for anyone sending letters: They must be addressed to Santa at 123 Elf Road, North Pole, 88888; they must have a complete return address — and they need to have a first-class stamp. 

Operation Santa relies on postal staff and volunteers to make sure letters sent to Santa get responses, and also lets volunteers “adopt” anonymized letters and send back gifts from Santa. Volunteers used to have to go to one of a handful of specific post office branches to adopt letters, but now, it can be done online. There’s a separate program for parents to write their own reply letters from Santa and get them mailed back to their kids with a North Pole postmark. 

The “Operation Santa” name wasn’t formalized until relatively recently, according to USPS, but the underlying program dates back to 1912, when the Postmaster General authorized local branches to open the letters and start sending replies. Children were already writing to Santa before then, according to a 2017 Smithsonian Magazine article, but the letters tended to be tossed out and didn’t receive replies unless a local postmaster decided to bend the rules.

The Operation Santa website prominently mentions the need for stamps multiple times, and the VERIFY team also reached out to USPS directly and received the same answer from a spokesperson: “All mail that enters the postal network must bear proper payment of postage.” When asked, the agency added that postage has always been required for letters to Santa.

Some of the Reddit posts appear to reference an internal rule change at USPS this year, suggesting that postal workers were instructed to send unstamped letters back when they might’ve previously let the omission slide. VERIFY was unable to find a definitive answer about that, but here’s what we did find:

Multiple USPS news releases and social media posts dating back to 2020 mention the need for a stamp, so as far as what USPS has publicly communicated, it would appear there’s been no change to the rules this year.

Searches through earlier versions of the Operation Santa website using the Wayback Machine reveal that the website did not mention the stamp requirement prior to 2021 — but it also never said there was no postage required. Earlier versions only included instructions for adopting letters, without much information about how to send them.

There are a few other possible reasons why some people might remember a different set of rules from when they were kids. A USPS page about the history of the program mentions that participation tended to vary between post office branches before things became more formalized in the past 20 years, so it’s possible the rules also used to be less formal. 

It’s also fairly common for local governments and agencies to set up their own programs for letters to Santa, often including local drop boxes rather than the mail system. VERIFY found several examples of local programs this year including in Kentucky, Illinois, California and Oregon, all of which specifically say they don’t require postage.

One final possible explanation: the stamp requirement appears to vary from country to country. USPS and the United Kingdom’s Royal Mail service both require stamps on letters mailed to Santa, but mail services in Canada and New Zealand specifically declare that no postage is required.

Got a question or a story about Portland or Oregon that you’d like us to VERIFY? Drop us a line at verify@kgw.com.