You can’t buy the kind of worldwide publicity the post office is getting over the letters to Santa fiasco.

Most of it is along the lines of  “killing” a treasured tradition. That may change a bit now.

The post office in Alaska has decided to work with volunteers to allow them to answer letters.

By employing security requirements to “protect childrens’ identities,” the post office will operate the program in Alaska, Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Sen. Mark Begich said today.

The requirements include crossing off  the last name and address of children on each letter to Santa and tracking the missives with a numerical code on each one. 

To me, this seems expensive and unnecessary.

It is also the system now  in place in the cities where the post office has enough staff to go through the letters one-by-one and enter the addresses in a database.

It was probably a judgement call on staffing levels that led to the decision to stop the program in Alaska.

The new plan is for postal employees to redact the letters, enter numbers in a computer and give the coded letters to volunteers.  In years past, local volunteers have answered tens of thousands of letters.

If there is a similar response this year, it means that someone at the post office will have to do a lot of number crunching, as well as crossing off names and addresses.

Press releases from Murkowski and Begich today said the senators were contacted by postal officials about the decision to go ahead with the redacted letter approach.

In Los Angeles, the LA Daily News says that letters to Santa in that community will not be answered because of the labor-intensive security requirements I’ve just described.

At a time when the post office is running a $3.8 billion annual deficit, it’s not a big news story if Santa letters don’t get answered in California, but North Pole is another matter.