No Ho-Ho-Ho for Mail Carriers

Despite changing fashions, rising costs and technology, many Americans cling to sending holiday cards and annual newsletters to family and friends -- and procrastinating until the week before Christmas when it comes to mailing them. As one result, chances are you’ll get more than your average 1.7 pieces of first-class mail today.

This is the year’s heaviest mail week; Monday alone saw 850 million outgoing pieces drop through Postal Service slots. That’s up 1% this year and 180 million pieces above a typical weekday.

The year-end volume, still a mammoth tide of red and green paper washing across the country in planes, trains, trucks and sacks, hardly masks the changes being wrought by e-mail in our snail-mail system. According to the latest data, the higher a household’s education (and income), the more mail it gets and the more likely it is to use the Internet for former mail functions, like paying bills. Though three-quarters of all recurring bills are still paid by mail, the highest-mail-volume homes now pay nearly 60% electronically, a potentially major drain on future postal use.

Yes, more than half your mail is advertising, and alas, less and less is “real” correspondence, which the post office calls household-to-household mail: those Christmas cards, personal letters and postcards. So much for the treasured troves of informative old letters found in attic boxes years later. But the shift reflects the combined effect, ease and convenience of e-mail and unlimited cellphone minutes to transport the revealing minutiae of daily life to loved ones. To adapt, the post office is stressing even more automation and more handling of packages, not yet e-mailable.

However, according to Larry Dozier, a holiday-harried Postal Service spokesman, not everyone’s Christmas mail will be successfully delivered by tonight. Dozier is certain about that: He admitted that he wouldn’t get around to mailing his Christmas cards until today, which will give his post office colleagues something more to deliver next week when the “returns” parcel flood begins.