Behind a blue door labeled customer service at the Bend post office, one of Santa’s elves is hard at work.

He takes the small letters with their scrawled North Pole addresses and reads each one. Sometimes the author wants a baby doll. One year the sender asked for a meaningful relationship.

No matter what the dream or gift, the elf swiftly reaches into his Christmas file folder where his holiday stationery is stashed.

He addresses each letter, stamps the envelope with a North Pole cancellation mark and sends Santa’s greetings on their way.

Did Santa write you this year? If so, these words may sound familiar: ”We received your letter to Santa Claus here at the post office.

”Even though it did not have the complete address for Santa, you can be assured that the Postal Elves at the post office have sent your letter on to Santa.”

Santa’s elves apparently look like the rest of us. At least this one does.

”Santa does not wear a hat down here,” Ray Allen said on Monday.

The information clerk who takes complaints is a third generation Bend postal employee whose grandfather died while delivering the mail.

Allen used to get about 40 to 50 letters a day during Christmas season.

This year he doesn’t think he got even 100 letters. They do still sometimes come in as early as April.

Allen has noticed that he receives fewer and fewer ”hardship” letters where kids write Santa that they’d like to have a Christmas this year or they’d like Santa to bring daddy home. He figures the social service agencies might be doing a pretty good job.

Though this elf doesn’t make a big deal out of his Santa helper work, he said it’s not intentionally kept secret. ”It’s just something we do,” he said.

If it weren’t Allen, he guesses someone else would fill in. He does his Santa work ”off the clock,” on his own time.

Sometimes Allen really is filling in for other local postal elves when letters show up from Indiana or Alaska.

The postal machines misread the zip code and off the envelopes fly to Bend. No matter where the letters are from, Allen can write back as long as there is a return address.

”You get a lot of stuff, Do you like cookies?’ Well, yeah. But there’s nothing you can do if there’s no return address,” he said.

When letter carriers pick up a Dear Santa letter at someone’s home, they will occasionally write in the return address if there isn’t one already. That makes this elf’s job a little easier.

Allen does Santa’s work, but he’s no more a believer than most. When he was little he and his brother would help his father, a postal employee, look for Christmas packages where the mail was stored.

He guesses he was around 6 or 8 when he stopped believing. ”We sort of figured it out,” Allen said.

Of course, this Santa’s elf could help the rest of us believe in the spirit of Christmas – even if the big guy leaves the letters up to Ray Allen.

Julia Lyon can be reached at 541-504-2336 or jlyon@bendbulletin.com.