Wednesday, December 24, 2025
USPS is bringing home the holidays
As the season winds down, employees are focused on serving customers
The Postal Service has entered the holiday season’s final stretch.
Across the nation, employees are working hard to accept, process and deliver the last batch of holiday mail and packages.
“This is the Postal Service’s busiest season, and it’s also a season that brings us so much joy. We love delivering holiday cards and packages to every doorstep,” said Michael Willard, plant manager at the Jacksonville, FL, Regional Processing and Distribution Center.
The organization had accepted 9.89 billion mailpieces and packages by 9:30 a.m. Eastern on Dec. 24, according to an online counter that has been running since the peak season began on Thanksgiving.
This year, USPS prepared for the holidays by installing more package sorting machines in processing facilities, updating service standards to better deliver mail and packages within a given region, rolling out new delivery vehicles and making other improvements.
At the Jacksonville plant, for example, USPS installed a state-of-the-art sorter that can process 14,000 packages an hour, up from 9,000 packages an hour on previous machines.
The new machine “is just one of the many improvements that allow us to deliver the exceptional service our customers have come to expect from USPS during the holidays,” Willard said.
Despite the challenges that come with a heavier workload, employees say they remain focused on getting the job done.
“I love making my customers happy,” said Jesse Mehew, a Grass Valley, CA, letter carrier walks more than 11 miles a day, according to YubaNet.com, a local news website.
He has a Zen-like approach to handling the stress of peak season.
“I just stop, take a breath and move on. We do one mailbox at a time,” he said.
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Milestones
Appointments, awards and retirements
Here’s a look at recent USPS announcements
• Jaime L. Brown, benefits programs manager, was named health benefits acting manager.
• Taylor A. Meyer, surface logistics program manager, was named logistics solutions acting senior director.
• Deborah A. Moss, career development manager, was named succession and internal talent acting director.
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Fa-la-la philately
Here’s the story of how holiday stamps came to be
Using holiday stamps to send season’s greetings may seem like a centuries-old tradition, but it’s really a relatively recent phenomenon.
The first-ever Christmas “stamp” was a nonpostage seal, an idea developed in 1904 by a postal clerk in Denmark to sell seals to raise funds to help children with tuberculosis.
That idea was picked up across the pond in 1907 by an American Red Cross volunteer who sought to fund a tuberculosis sanitorium in Delaware by selling seals. The success of that effort led the Red Cross to go nationwide with Christmas seals the next year.
The burgeoning popularity of the seals sparked widespread interest in a holiday-themed postage stamp, but despite repeated requests over the years, the Post Office Department resisted, believing the costs of a seasonal stamp would outweigh the benefits.
In the words of then-Postmaster General J. Edward Day, the department finally relented “in response to heavy public demand.” On Nov. 1, 1962, a stamp depicting a wreath flanked by two glowing tapers was released at the annual convention of the National Association of Postmasters in Pittsburgh.
The initial order of 500 million stamps — the most ever printed for a special issue — quickly sold out, and by the end of the year, 862 million had sold, setting a sales record.
The success of the 1962 Christmas stamp meant a new annual postal tradition was born.
In 1970, the organization began the practice of issuing both a “traditional” stamp, with overtly religious themes, and a “contemporary” one, with secular imagery.
In the 1990s, the Postal Service expanded the traditions covered in the holiday stamp program. The first Lunar New Year stamp was issued in 1992, and in 1996, the first Hanukkah stamp — launching the organization’s Holiday Celebrations series — was released. The series has also celebrated Kwanzaa, Eid Mubarak and Diwali.
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