Naughty Elf Sends Bad Letters:

Rogue Elf sending filthy letters:
Article from: Agence France-Presse

THE national post office and police in Canada are searching for a "rogue elf" who has been sending filthy letters to children on behalf of Santa Claus.
A handful of reply letters to children who wrote to jolly Saint Nick contained comments such as: "This letter is too long, you dumb shit."

Canada Post spokeswoman Cindy Daoust said: "We firmly believe there is just one rogue elf out there responsible for the letters. In our history, we've never had a problem of this nature."

She explained that the letters were part of a Santa letter-writing program in which postal workers across Canada reply to letters from children around the world posted to Santa Claus, the North Pole, Canada, postal code H0H0H0.

Every reply letter is identical, except for a hand-written personalized postscript added by one of 11,000 volunteers.

Last year, Canada Post replied to 1.06 million letters on behalf of Santa, and 15 million letters have been posted since the program began in 1981.

Canada Post president Moya Greene said: "We are shocked and heart-broken that this much-loved quarter-of-a-century old program has experienced an incident of this kind."

"We deeply apologize to any families affected by this," she added.

Canada Post briefly shut down the program in Ottawa after parents complained. A dozen inappropriate letters had been dropped in mailboxes throughout the Canadian capital, but there could be more, officials warned.

Previously, Canada Post had received only one complaint about the program. In 1999, a seven-year-old in Oshawa, Ontario received a Santa message from Canada Post that called him "one greedy little boy!"