A Different Type of Christmas Story...

...has unfolded due to the men and women of the United States Postal Service. As you all are probably aware, Colorado and Wyoming were socked with a blizzard that dumped feet of snow on them over the past few days. Because of the snowstorm, lots of things got backed up, like the airlines who cancelled all flights in the areas, the roads that were buried under feet of snow, the stores that just did not open, and so on. It was a bad blizzard. One of the other things that got badly backed up was the mail. There was just no way to make deliveries of packages that had not even arrived in the area yet due to no air service, and local deliveries were hampered also.

So what to do in a situation like that? Well the post office asked for volunteers, to deliver mail on a Sunday. Sunday deliveries are a very unusual thing indeed, at least nowadays. What made it even more unusual, of course, is that the particular Sunday for those deliveries is today - Christmas Eve 2006. So what do you think happened? Did they get a few volunteers to deliver the 300,000 packages that arrived in Colorado and Wyoming on this Saturday? No they did not!

I guess I could not blame anyone for not volunteering to work on Sunday, no matter what your religion, if only because it is usually a day off. Furthermore, I could not blame anyone who did not want to work on Christmas Eve either. I mean, how could I, or you, find fault with anyone for wanting to have this day off. So instead of getting a few volunteers to deliver the backed up, and soon to be late for Christmas mail, what did the post office get? They got 1,500 postal employee volunteers to deliver the mail, that is what they got. Whether they are getting overtime or not, can you imagine that!

Fifteen hundred postal service employees volunteered to in essence play Santa's helpers to get the delayed holiday mail delivered on time. According to the article 1,500 Mail Carriers Work on Christmas Eve to Deliver Blizzard-Delayed Packages in Colorado and Wyoming , found at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,238680,00.html, one of the mail carriers, Robin Smith, even delivered a big package addressed to GRANDMA.

"Smith said one elderly woman was overwhelmed when she knocked on her door and handed her a package.

"She looked very lonely and her car was buried" in snow, Smith said. "She was like, 'I didn't know I would see this.' I gave her a great big one. It was to 'Grandma.""

That is not all either. Tomorrow, 500 postal employees will continue to deliver mail in the blizzard struck area. That will be on Christmas day!

I tell you it chokes me up while I write about it. I think it will be a while before I complain about the U.S. Postal Service again! My hat, and my heart felt wishes for a wonderful holiday season, go out to the men and women of the U.S. Postal Service, today they certainly lived up to their image as seen in The Miracle On 34th Street when they delivered the mail into the courtroom and helped prove Kris Kringle was Santa Claus. Sure that was only a movie, but who would have ever thought the Postal Service doing such a nice thing, as what they did today, would happen in real life. Just wonderful, that’s what it is, just wonderful!

Merry Christmas to each and every U.S. Postal Service employee; no matter if you celebrate Christmas or not, I just truly hope each of you has a merry day tomorrow, especially all of you who volunteered to do this really nice thing.

Merry Christmas,
Glenn B