CARBONDALE, Ill. (WSIL) ---A lot of people have been going into the Post Office to send out Christmas gifts including Renee Swartz who just sent one out for her mom.
“We're mailing a Christmas parcel to my mom, we made homemade Christmas crackers and sent them to her for her Christmas dinner,� Swartz said.
She has confidence it will arrive right before Christmas, like Susan Northquist is getting some Christmas-themed stamps for her cards.
“I don't think there's any problem right now, but the closer it gets the tighter it gets,� Northquist said.
Tim Norman who works in strategic communications for the United States Post Office would agree with her.
“We always tell everybody the best thing to do is mail as early as you can because there's a huge amount of mail volume that comes out for the holidays,� Norman said.
Amy Moon just sent off her grandchildren's gifts.
“It was a little expensive for us but that's okay when you're dealing with your grandkids. They can get away with murder,� Moon said.
This holiday season, the USPS has accepted over 10 billion items, and they are still expecting more. Norman says they were already preparing for this season just after the last one ended.
“We've got 348 package sorting machines across the nation. These machines do a tremendous amount of volume, and they allow us to process 70 million packages a day during the peak season. So that's, that's a tremendous help,� Norman said.
Norman says this is their busiest week of the peak season, and this year they aren't doing surcharges for residential deliveries.
“A service that we have, it's a free service, it's called Informed Delivery, and you can daily get an email and see the mail pieces that you're gonna get, and also the packages that are coming to you with the tracking number, so you can kind of be prepared for that,� Norman said.
Norman says if you want your gift to arrive before Christmas and are mailing it out on Thursday, the best shipping option is priority Mail Express.
