Make sure your kid gets a letter from Santa

The post office is offering a free service allowing parents to make sure their kids receive a letter from Santa.

The free Santa2me service allows parents to electronically prepare a letter from Santa to their children. The post office will then print the letters on a festive letterhead and mail them to the children before the end of the year.

The service is available at www.santa2me.com until December 20 to give the post office time to prepare the replies.

The service comes at a busy time for the post office with staff putting in extra hours to sort out mail in time for the festive season.

“People work overtime at the main post office in Nicosia and at Larnaca airport where we unload the mail from the planes,” post office superintendent Paris Vouniotis said on Tuesday.

“From there the mail is sent to the central sorting centre at Latsia where some people also work overtime.”

The department used to hire extra staff to help during the holidays but the economic collapse three years ago meant measures like a freeze on recruitment, which is still in place.

But the uptick in mail is not as large as it used to be; these days there is only a 10 per cent increase in traffic compared to other times of the year.

Nevertheless, people are advised to post mail well beforehand.

Vouniotis recommended that parcels and letters should be sent abroad at least two weeks before Christmas. Domestic mail should be sent around three days earlier than usual. Details will be posted on the post office website.

So far, he said, there haven’t been any delays and none were expected, but this depended on the airlines as well.

“From the UK we don’t know, the airlines put their passengers first and then they see how many bags they can take.”

The only problem that exists right now regards the mail seized by police in October after it was discovered that a postal worker had been stealing mail bags for around a year.

When the theft was discovered and he was arrested, more than 200 mail sacks with undelivered letters and small packages were found in his possession.

Police has not yet released the contents of the bags pending investigations and court proceedings.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.