Santa’s Special Deliverer

Dear Santa, my dad works hard but he doesn’t have enough money to pay for extras like Christmas. My sister and I have been very good though, and we really need new shoes for school.

Like the famous bearded man for whom she intercepts letters, Carol Samaniego has one of the most exhausting jobs on the planet.

She may not have a single night to deliver gifts around the globe, but the U.S. Postal Service worker takes it upon herself each year to open thousands of envelopes addressed to the North Pole and decide, in an impossible show of restraint and objectivity, which children are in the most need of help during the holidays.

Then she hunts for packs of generous elves and puts them to work.

“The letters come in and I read them at work and in the car and in the bathroom and then I take them home and read them there,” Samaniego said of the mounds of mail that have been spilling into the main post office in Santa Ana since Thanksgiving. “They make you cry, some of them. They make you want to give everything you have to answer every single little wish.”

The letters that stand out the most to Samaniego, who is fondly referred to by co-workers as the “Post Office Santa,” are not the ones asking for expensive video games or dolls or pets or are printed by a computer and colored with fancy glitter pens and stickers. Samaniego takes a closer look at the notes that are scrawled in pencil or crayon on wrinkled scraps of paper, written in modest voices that practically plead for help.

Some ask for clothes and make sure to include a size chart for every family member. Others don’t even ask for a gift for themselves, like the Anaheim boy who sealed his letter with a string of Xs and O’s.

“Santa, I really hope you read my letter,” he wrote. “This has been a really hard year for us. We really need your help. Could you bring us a turkey for Christmas so my mom won’t cry?”

Samaniego plows through the letters one by one, getting help when she can from a handful of colleagues who separate the mail into three piles.

The shortest stack is from children asking only for Santa to write them back, proof, perhaps, that their letter really did reach the North Pole after all, even without a stamp. “I love getting letters from celebrities,” one 9-year-old girl from Dana Point wrote. “And I would just love to have your autograph.”

The tallest pile, however, is from children Samaniego wants most desperately to help. They are from youngsters who enclose photographs of themselves and their families and beg for notebooks or slippers. Some write prayers to a red-suited man they say they know doesn’t exist.

“Please, God, I’m hoping for magic this Christmas,” scribbled Madeline, a 12-year-old from Anaheim. “I know there’s no such thing as Santa Claus, but I don’t know what else to do.”

Many of the letters are written in a tone that clearly mimics the words of an adult, words Samaniego suspects the children have heard all too much: “Dear Santa, the money goes to pay for rent and other problems. So if you can give my brothers and me a new bedroom lamp for Christmas, it would really be a great present.”

“An 8-year-old doesn’t just come up with this stuff on her own,” Samaniego said. “This is their life.”

The letters, sent from throughout Orange County, are funneled through the main post office and into the hands of Samaniego, who helps find volunteers and businesses to sponsor the children who are among the most in need. Residents can also come into her office in Santa Ana, leaf through the letters and choose one, she said. The helpers can personally deliver gifts or request the help of letter carriers.

“We’ll get it there, one way or another,” said Samaniego, a community services manager for the Postal Service.

In the decade that she’s been working as the Post Office Santa, Samaniego said her volunteers have always come back in following years, usually with a friend. In that way, the program has grown into the hundreds of helpers.

“The word spreads and it catches on,” she said. “If you do this once, if you read these letters and then see a child’s eyes light up and look at you that way, let me just tell you, you are hooked.”

That is the biggest payoff, she said, for weeding through heartbreaking stories every year and knowing there is no way she can possibly get to them all. Samaniego said her sadness is also balanced by the joy she finds in hundreds of other letters filled with traditional wish lists from children.

“Hi, Santa! I hope you can still read letters with your eyeglasses,” wrote one third-grader from San Juan Capistrano. “I don’t really think I’ve been good this year but am I still going to get the Spice Girls doll I want?”

One Placentia boy simply wanted to send Santa a forwarding address: “We moved to a new house. There used to be two girls living here but I want to make sure you know a little boy lives here now.”