Mission: Christmas Mail!

Today was quite a day with the Christmas mail. After lunch everyone in the office was kind enough to help me with organizing the Christmas packages.  There is a huge unoccupied space next door to the Christmas room.  We just opened the door from the Christmas room and started working. (I had called the real estate management office to ask permission to use the space for a few hours but they were closed for an office function.  I made the determination that we would ask forgiveness afterwards if necessary...) 

The lovely thing about that open area is that they had some huge rolling containers-- three-shelf units that we were able to organize and store the packages on.  I’d already put stickers on each of the packages indicating the zone where the missionaries are laboring so we knew which zone the missionaries were in and where we needed to put the packages.   It really took maybe 30 minutes with everyone working like a dog to move the packages from the Christmas room where the packages were all in disarray into an organized storage.  In my own defense, I had been organizing the best I could as I went along over the past month, and actually yesterday when I knew which zones the missionaries had transferred to, I put zone stickers on all the packages, then began moving the boxes into piles along the walls sort of by size. This did make today’s project easier.  

The nice thing about it was that after we put all the packages on the rolling shelves we were able to verify who had received packages in each zone and who had not. (The idea is that at our mission-wide Christmas gathering each missionary will receive one package. 

Carts for three zones.  We have nine zones in the mission so there are six more carts.

As it happens many of the missionaries have more than mom and dad sending them packages so there are quite a few packages left over.) We then took the rest of the packages into our office and stacked them by zones in the office. Dear One and I then moved the rolling shelves into the Christmas room leaving tiny aisles between them so we can add the remaining gifts as they come in over the next week.

We are now trying to figure out how to get the other packages, the "extras",  which are Christmas packages mostly, to the missionaries so that they’ll get to open them on Christmas.  We have not quite figured that out yet but the assistants to the president are thinking about it overnight so by tomorrow we may have a plan. Hopefully over the next three or four days we will get these “extra” packages out to the missionaries.

Three of the "extras" piles in the office.  Yes, we can still move around in the office but you can see that we will be glad to move to boxes on to the missionaries!

After finishing the packages project, there was a box of mail that we’ve received over the last three or four days that have been put on the back burner.  They all needed to be prepared for mail forwarding. This entails creating mailing labels (which is a snap in the new correspondence system, but a little time consuming with 140 letters!), affixing the labels to the letters, using a black grease pencil to mark out all the extraneous markings on the envelopes so the post office can forward the mail, and then getting the mail into the mailbox.  Dear One was anxious to go home but I wanted to get this job finished today SO he helped me yet again with one of my projects!  He is so good to me.  It took us both working an hour and a half to get this done!  We then got ourselves together, took our satchels, shut off the light, locked the door, and got to the elevator before I realized we had forgotten the box of mail on the counter!!  Can you believe it?!  

I gave him my satchel to take to the car then went back to the office to pick up the box of mail. Well, that shows you how tired we both were.  Everyone else had left the office ages before.  Even Elder and Sister J who usually stay after we do, (well, they come in after we do, too...) had left the office almost an hour before we did.  Now it is done.  Such a good feeling.  And the letters are in the outgoing mailbox outside so they will be picked up at 11 tomorrow morning and be on their way.  Yay!