Now That Christmas is Over...

...Here’s Some Christmas Mailing Tips! 

If there’s one thing you can’t accuse me of, it’s being timely!  If I had thought of writing this back in November, it would have been a great article:  now, a couple of days after Christmas it’s just something to fill space with.  Or is it?  Maybe this is information you could use all year long, not only during the mad-mailing rush of the Holiday season.

As a letter carrier, I get to see all sorts of letters come through that leave me scratching my head.  The blame goes directly on the shoulders of the mailer in most cases.  First on the list at Christmastime are bad addresses. 

“Are you kidding me”, you ask?  No.  Somehow the magic of Christmas also brings out the magic of non-existent street numbers.  The regular carrier usually knows the right address, and sorts the card to the correct house.  This does not mean “problem solved”. 

If, when a badly numbered letter comes through and a substitute is on the route who doesn’t know the family names, it will get sorted as “No Such Number” and returned to the sender.  This, like it or not, is the proper handling of a bad number.  So if your regular letter carrier manages to deliver a card or letter with an obviously bad number, why not drop your friends or family a quick note and just ask them to check their address book and make sure they actually have the right address on file?

I’ve got one family on my route that gets a card every year from the same family member who continuously uses the same bad address!  It’s become a tradition I look forward to… how sick is that?

Hand-in-hand with the bad numbers come the cards with bad numbers and bad names.  Names like “Grandma and Grandpa”, or just a first name – gee, isn’t that adorable?  Now knock it off!  If you can’t get the address right, at least give us the full name to work with, in the hope that we can still get your stinkin’ card delivered!  Honestly, over half of the people on my route can be called “Grandma or Grandpa”.  I need a better clue than that.  Come to think of it, even if you can get the address right… you still need to use the full names. 

Why?  Sometimes “things” happen during the mailing process and part of the name or address gets smudged, streaked or obliterated.  The more information that’s left intact and readable, the better chance there is to get that piece delivered.

Use your return address – always!  If the card isn’t deliverable, we’d like to send it back to you.  In fact, you’d probably like to know that there is a problem.  It could be a woefully bad number, or that the card is undeliverable as addressed (which often means that the people have long-since moved, and their forwarding order has expired).  Sometimes it might come back as “Insufficient Address” which usually means that they live in an apartment complex and a suite number is needed.  This is yet another case where the regular carrier might know which unit they live in, but a substitute won’t… and while returning the letter as “Insufficient Address” might seem unkind to you it is still the correct method of handling it.

Still, none of this will matter if you don’t use a return address.  You’ll keep mailing cards year after year, and they will keep being sent to the Dead Letter Office instead of returning back to you to alert you of a problem. 

My last thought is directed at the kind-hearted people who like to leave an envelope out for their mailman during the Christmas season.  We love your kindness… we really do!  And we’d like to be able to say “thank you” too… if we know who to thank.  “Huh?”  Remember what I said earlier about substitutes?  They don’t always know family names, because the route is not their own.  So the same rules apply here… please put your full return address on the envelope or package!

A lot of times a substitute (usually one of the new kids that feel pressured to go as fast as they can) will see an envelope hanging on, or placed inside, a mailbox and will just grab it and place it in with the rest of the outgoing letters they have picked up, never noticing that it says “To Our Mailman” and that there’s no stamp on it.  The rest is history… it goes with all the other letters to the local processing center (which is often in another city many miles away) where it is then found, with no way to determine where it came from or who it belongs to.

We see these cards every year when a list is made out hoping that a carrier in our region might recognize the names.  “To our Mail Carrier, from Bill and Amy”.  Or, “To George, thanks for the great service!  The Smiths”.  So while a full return address might seems silly, it will certainly help if something goes wrong!

I almost sent a card meant for me out with the mail this year; there was a stack of cards in a mailbox to be picked up, and I fanned through the pile making sure there were stamps on all of the envelopes.  (Something else that happens this time of year… )  The last envelope in the pile didn’t have a stamp… but it said “To Our Letter Carrier”.  That was a close one!

So if you plan to leave something out for your carrier next year, please put your return address somewhere on the package or envelope.  Because as I almost proved this year, not only are the subs capable of putting a personal card into the mail stream – it can happen to the veteran carriers as well!