Sex offender prompts change in 'Operation Santa'
By Lori Basheda
The Orange County Register
A sex offender has put an end to the tradition of the public answering Dear Santa letters that flood Orange County post offices each December.
Each year thousands of kids write letters addressed to Santa Claus, asking for everything from toys to a job for their dad or something that will make their mom happy. The wish lists end up in bins in post offices throughout the country.
Since 1912, good deed doers across the nation have rifled through those bins, taking home letters and then setting about making the children's Christmas wishes come true. In the letters, the kids tell Santa how to find them, writing their addresses in pencil, pen or sometimes crayon.
Last year, however, a man apparently arrived at a post office in Maryland and took a letter a girl wrote to Santa. An alert postal worker figured out the man was a registered sex offender before he made contact with the girl. But the scare led the U.S. Postal Service to implement a new Operation Santa policy this year, according to Orange County's postal spokesman Rich Maher.
"Unfortunately, we live in an age where we just can't be too careful — especially in regard to children," Maher said.
The policy gives post offices throughout the nation two options.
They can simply tell people who arrive at the post office this month looking for Santa letters that they are no longer being made public.
Or the post office can copy each letter and then block out all names and addresses from one of those copies for the public to see and give it a code number. If someone wants to fulfill the child's Christmas wishes, they can then return to the post office with the items and the post office will mail it to the letter writer.
Some post offices, like the North Pole, a tiny town in Alaska, are doing this. But Maher said that all the Southern California post offices decided it would be too time-consuming and are opting out of Operation Santa. "It would be taking away form our core mission of delivering the holiday mail," he said.
Maher said postal employees will be given the opportunity to volunteer to "adopt" some of the more needy letter writers themselves if they wish, hopefully filling some of the void.
Maher said the Santa Ana district, which serves Orange County, also will be sending out a generic Santa letter to all kids who wrote letters, thanking them for writing and telling them "the reindeer are getting geared up." Based on the number of letters they have gotten from kids in the past, they expect Santa to send out about 4,000 letters to OC kids this year.
That makes me so sad.
I need to find out what is happening locally. We also need to decide if we are doing an Angel tree or making a MOD donation in honor of Gabriel this Christmas (we are donating toys already, I've donated to the Blue Santa book drive already, this is separate, for Gabe).
So, this registered sex offender
1) Is his sex offense related to children? Sex offender does not equal pedo's
2) How did the postal worker know he was a sex offender?
3) How do we know the sex offender's intention's were malicious? What if it was honest?
4) That screening process is way too time consuming. There's no way it will work, with an already understaffed post office struggling with budget cuts.
5) Just partner with charity organizations and send all the letters to them. Let them handle it.
They can start a non-profit charity organization, with a website. They sort through all the letters, record the personal information for each letter, then black out all the information on the letter. Leave only the first names and the letters.
Then post them online for generous strangers to sort through.
So, say, a generous man from Rhode Island with nothing to do, goes to www.whatever.com, sorts through letters, and picks one or two of them. Buys the gifts or whatever, and mails them to the organization with the information of which letter it belonged to.
Then the charity sends the stuff to the kid.
Problem solved. For all future x-mas, post office forwards all this mail to the charity.
Charity organization can claim to be santa helpers, who have contact with santa.
In fact, that's a great idea. I'm too lazy though, so one of you do it.
WGAF...hopefully this guy was just a rapist of adults who happened to be feeling charitable.
Perhaps it was the guy's 'O' face he made when the postal worker handed over the letter.2) How did the postal worker know he was a sex offender?
3) How do we know the sex offender's intention's were malicious? What if it was honest?
I think that was the point. The post office probably didn't want to deal with it anymore.4) That screening process is way too time consuming. There's no way it will work, with an already understaffed post office struggling with budget cuts.
Perfect.5) Just partner with charity organizations and send all the letters to them. Let them handle it.
Not that I'm advocating sex offenses, but it's this kind of bigotry that leads to people castrating themselves like in that movie Little Children.
If you're a parent and ever want to be scared less, go to familywatchdog.us and type in your address. You will be astonished and disgusted by what you find. I have a convicted child rapist living 5 houses from me. Five houses. And we walk by his house to the bus stop. Call it bigotry if you want, but if that mother er ever so much as glances out his window at my kid, I will do my best impression of a psychotic mother bear about to murder someone. And just to be clear, there is no room for sympathy when you click his name and it says "sexual assault" of a "3-year-old female". ing disgusting.
yeh that's different
I was just referring to the people who think sex offenders = pedo child molesters
You can be charged with a sex offense for being 18 and having a 17 year old girlfriend. that would make them a sex offender.
i still believe that the justice system needs to separate real child offenders away from other sex offenders that have nothing to do with children. the recidivism rates for non-child sex offender cases are really low, most never do it again, but it's the child molesters who have the high repeat offense rates.
in your case though, yeh i would be scared too.
Last edited by MiamiHeat; 12-02-2009 at 10:29 PM.
'Operation Christmas Child'
500,000 gift boxes going out to needy kids
By Doug Irving
The Orange County Register
Hannah Lackey, 16 of Marin County, thinks of how every box represents a child in the world. Work stopped at the top of the hour for prayer during Operation Christmas Child held at a Santa Ana warehouse.
SANTA ANA – The gifts come postmarked from around the west, bound for desperate places around the world. But they stop here first, at a rented-out warehouse, for a little extra care and a few extra prayers.
They're simple things – a pair of socks, a jump-rope, a handful of peppermint candies – packed into shoeboxes and sent as Christmas gifts to children in some 100 countries. The workers at the Santa Ana warehouse will check, seal, box and ship more than half a million of those shoeboxes over the next several days.
Santa Ana is the West Coast hub of Operation Christmas Child, an annual gift drive since 1993 described by its organizers as the world's largest Christmas project. It's run by an evangelical nonprofit group called Samaritan's Purse; the president, Franklin Graham, is the son of evangelist Billy Graham.
"We're helping the people," said Marcus Dukes, 51, a mover from Anaheim loading trucks at the Santa Ana warehouse. "Making someone else's Christmas. Yeah, I like that. I love that."
The people who send in their shoeboxes – and there are millions of them – are responding to the same request the group makes every year: Go into your closet, dig out an old shoebox, and fill it with gifts that will "bring delight to a child." The group expects to deliver around 8 million of those shoeboxes this year, working with local churches in the countries it serves.
The shoeboxes routed through the Santa Ana center come from as far away as Alaska and Montana. They're going to such faraway places as Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines and China.
But first, they pass through the hands of people like Debbie Aleksic, who's been volunteering for Operation Christmas Child for a few years now. She's 46 years old and came from Moreno Valley with her son David and her niece Rachel Green to help.
She lifted the lid on each shoebox that came her way, checking for prohibited gifts. No shampoo or snow globes that could leak. No mirrors that could break. No money that could make a child a target for thieves, no toy animals that could scare a child, no war toys.
Then, with a "skrrritch" of packing tape, she sealed the boxes and packed them into a cardboard box, destined for a child in some unknown place. Every hour or so, she and the other volunteers and the paid workers paused to say a quick prayer for the boxes, and for the children who would open them.
"You don't know who's getting this box, but God knows," she said as she worked. "It might go to ... gosh, you don't know. It's just a neat blessing to see."
It might go to someone like Livia Satterfield. She was 12 years old, hungry and neglected in a Romanian orphanage when a woman brought her a shoebox for Christmas. Among the gifts she found inside were her own toothbrush, her own soap – and a box of hair clips. She was so excited about those clips that she put them all in at once.
She's 22 years old now and lives in Georgia with the woman who delivered that shoebox and later returned to adopt her. She was in Santa Ana this week, packing shoeboxes and telling the volunteers in the warehouse that what they were doing would indeed bring delight to a child.
"That simple gift just brought us alive," she said. "It was just something simple that meant a treasure to us."
The Operation Christmas Child processing center in Santa Ana, at 3100 S. Susan St., will be open and accepting walk-up shoebox donations until Dec. 12. Go to www.samaritanspurse.org or call 800-353-5949 for information.
While I disagree with the person that you were quoting as to his point #1 (its better to be safe than sorry). The registered sex offender could have been a pedo, an adult rapist, or could have mooned a car as a teenager. So, even though the first two would be horrible to give this info two, the last BFD. Who hasn't shown their canned hams to some unsuspecting (or deserving) motorist.
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