UPS Store jokes about shredding kids’ letters to Santa

This joke didn't "sleigh" them.

The UPS Store deleted a meant-to-be-funny tweet about destroying letters to Santa after critics slammed it as too dark, according to a report Monday.

"If your child addresses a letter to the North Pole, you can leave it with us. We do shredding," read the tweet, which was posted Sunday.

But the naughty gag outraged some parents, who called it a Grinch-like faux pas.

"Why not just punch the little kid in the face, while yelling 'there is no such thing as Santa?'" one critic blasted.

Another person tweeted, "I hope any kids aren't reading this."

The firm yanked down the tweet Monday after noticing, "things [were] going in the wrong direction," a rep told BuzzFeed.

"We did not want to take away from the magic of Christmas," said Staci Reidinger, a public relations representative for the company. "[The tweet] was just to get people laughing."

But the firm "backed off" when it realized the punch line bombed — and the tweet had gone viral.

"We do a lot of puns that have second- or third-level meanings in our posts. We thought this was going to be one of those," she said.

She added, "We're very sensitive to what we do on social, and if we see things that are going in the wrong direction, we want to say, 'OK, we're going to back off of this.'"