In Santa Rosa and elsewhere, busiest shipping week of year here

Melissa Rivera spent most of her lunch break Monday making sure the homemade Christmas cookies she baked over the weekend would get to friends and family in Florida on time.

“I’ve been in my car packaging it all for half an hour, and now I’m going to stand in line for another half-hour,” said the 34-year-old, smiling despite the line that wound to the lobby inside the downtown Santa Rosa Post Office during its noon rush.

Monday marked the start of the busiest mailing week of the year for the United States Postal Service, which expects a 10 percent increase in packages this holiday season compared to last year, said Augustine Ruiz, USPS Bay Area spokesman.

“People trust the postal service,” he said. “We’ve been doing it for 242 years, so they know we’ve got Christmas down pat.”

From Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, the postal service expects to process 15 billion pieces of mail nationwide - 850 million of that will be packages alone, Ruiz said.

Adding a kink to the process is that Christmas Day falls on Monday for the first time in 11 years. While the postal service does make some Sunday deliveries - Priority Mail Express, some first-class packages and certain Amazon packages - the bottom line is mail needs to go out earlier than usual to reach its destination on time.

Santa Rosa Postmaster Michelle Tucker prepared for that, filling empty positions plus hiring two additional clerks just for the holiday season.

“We’ve been doing this every year for many, many, many years,” she said. “It’s early days, expecting your carrier to be in your neighborhood when you’re leaving for work. … You can expect that throughout the week. We don’t deliver early in the morning, usually, but it’s getting that kind of planning in, planning to get all the parcels out.”

Tucker said last week her carriers delivered 153,611 packages throughout Santa Rosa, and she expected an additional 165,000 would go out by the end of this week.

“When you deal with all the packages that we deal with, and you work long hours, people can get a little tired by the end of it,” she said.

“I looked at the calendar the other day, and I was like, ‘It’s only 10 days away, are you kidding me?’”

Amber Drinnin was among the many waiting in line at the post office Monday to ship a present to her boyfriend’s sister in San Diego, but she left the woman’s address at home.

“I’m frantically trying to get him to send me the address because I don’t want to wait in this line twice,” she said, holding the red-wrapped package. “I’m being a last-minute Lucy.”

At the downtown Santa Rosa FedEx Office, things weren’t quite as busy as at the post office a few blocks away, but people were anxious to get their packages out on time, nevertheless.

Ashley Alvarez, 32, came in with about a dozen packages - each wrapped in decorative paper and bows - that needed to get to Tampa in time to be opened Christmas morning.

Alvarez is flying there to see family on Christmas Eve, but decided it was easier to mail them than pay for and deal with an extra suitcase.

“It ended up being less stress to mail the gifts,” she said. “And the other thing (is) what if I didn’t make it back? I wanted them to at least have the gifts. God forbid my flight gets delayed or anything.”

You can reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at 707-521-5205 or christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @SeaWarren.