Return to Sender. Please.

Just when you thought you’d heard every possible kind of holiday story, here comes the U.S. Postal Service with a forlorn plea for help.

You know those nifty white plastic bins with the sturdy handles, those lightweight tubs that fit inside each other and were designed to carry mail from processing centers to homes and businesses, those government containers that cost $3.25 each and carry a warning about theft of official property bringing a $1,000 fine and three years in federal prison? Well, it seems millions of these handy containers have gone missing. No doubt due to millions of coincidental accidents. But the Postal Service needs them back. Please.

Not that any otherwise law-abiding American would intentionally turn a durable government postal bin into, say, a laundry basket, tool case, magazine rack, book bin, wastebasket, pet bed, footrest, firewood box, stool, plant box, portable dresser drawer, garbage can, recycle container, file holder, toy chest, income tax document container, hose holder or kitten hauler.

But just in case you find one or 10 around your business, house or apartment, feel free to leave it or them at a post office, mailbox or delivery door. It’s especially important today when Americans hand-address many of the 850 million pieces that will make Monday the year’s busiest mailing day. Tuesday will be the year’s busiest sorting day and Wednesday the heaviest delivery day, when some 9,000 plastic mail bins will leave the typical postal center.

“We’d really like to get the bins back,” said George Marsh, a Los Angeles postal spokesman. “There’s no amnesty or anything. But no questions asked.”

Throughout history the Postal Service has used many delivery means -- mules, ponies, wagons, trucks, trains, airplanes, canvas bags, even missiles in one fast, and brief, delivery experiment. The most practical container has been these simple plastic bins. They hold large quantities of incoming mail, trundle along sorting lines collecting pieces spit out by computerized sorters, get steered to belts to the proper trucks, are hand-carried to delivery doors and left there on the honor system. That’s where the problem seems to be.

Postal officials bought 20 million of these containers in the last two years, a $65-million investment. In rain and snow, sleet and storm, the sturdy bins went out on their appointed rounds. But many fewer came back. What to do? The mail must go through. The Postal Service issued a news release recently. In one week, 210,924 bins were anonymously returned. Do you maybe have No. 210,925?