Working overtime during the holidays is no one's idea of fun, but if postal workers in the area didn't come in Sunday's to sort and deliver packages, many people wouldn't receive their Christmas gifts until after the 25th.

These people volunteer a few hours every weekend to hand out the packages that weren't received during the week. More people are home on Sunday's, so more parcels can be delivered.

"I'm not sure if it would be manageable," said Phil Gregoire, the Canada Post superintendent for Morden, Winkler, and Altona.

"With online shopping, our volumes have increased dramatically from year-to-year."

In the Winkler/Morden area, thousands of packages have been moved through the post offices in just the past few weeks. Trucks loaded with packages arrive every day and need to be delivered quickly. Otherwise, the post offices would burst from being overstocked.

When a package can't be delivered to a person's home, a card is left at the residence, alerting the person that their package is available for pick-up. In Morden, these packages are returned to the post office. In Winkler, Shopper's Drug Mart receives the undelivered packages.

"The amount of packages is probably ten times more than it's ever been in the past," said the front store manager at Shoppers Drug Mart in Winkler, Mike Agnew. 

A small sample of the packages the post office in Shoppers Drug Mart handles every day. The majority of the stored packages had already been delivered the day this photo was taken.

"Last year was bad enough, this year is quite a bit more."

The store includes a post office where people can purchase specialty envelopes and other mailing supplies. Around Christmas, the in-store post office is under pressure as packages flow in. However, Agnew mentioned their post office only has one till, and this till is used to enter every package they receive and log each one that is picked up. This creates a plug in the drain. People will come to Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up their parcel, but sometimes it won't have been logged into the store's system yet.

"The amount of people coming into the store is taking up time to process the packages that are here," Agnew said.

Packages that can't be delivered to houses are taken to the in-store post office in the middle of the afternoon by mail-carriers. A few hundred could be brought there in a single day.

All the work done by the Shoppers Drug Mart staff to log packages and hand them out to people lined up with their receipt cards is a service to the community. The store receives no direct benefit from storing and handling the area's Christmas packages.

During the rest of the year, the demand is more relaxed, but at Christmas, Agnew estimated there could be 500 packages coming through the store per day.

"It's the nature of the beast," he added.

Gregoire said the postal staff in the area work hard. "They're great staff in Winkler, Morden, and Altona," he said. "They're positive, and they want everybody to receive their parcels before Christmas."

In 2014, 71 per cent of Canadian respondents to a Statista survey indicated they planned to buy at least one Christmas gift online. That number has assuredly risen in the past two years.