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Royal Mail has admitted it is still to deliver cards and letters sent out for Christmas, nearly a fortnight after 25 December.
Many have landed on doormats in the past few days but some households continue to wait for their Christmas post.
Phil Hewitt, an author, said he had posted a Christmas card to his mother-in-law on 12 December using a first-class stamp, but that it had taken three weeks to reach its intended destination, finally turning up on Wednesday.
The last date for posting Christmas mail first class was Friday 16 December. Mr Hewitt described the state of affairs as “a total shambles”.
In East Grinstead, West Sussex, retiree Roy Henderson was surprised to received a card on Thursday – Twelfth Night by some people’s calculations – the date by which tradition dictates Christmas decorations should be removed to avoid bad luck.
He has received four Christmas cards this week in total. Keen to display the belated good wishes, Mr Henderson said he would “risk some ‘bad luck’ and leave them up for a while”.
Meanwhile, in Watford, Hertfordshire, postal bags might have been especially heavy today if resident Charlie Hancock’s experience is anything to go by. He has just received “another six Christmas cards”.
Mr Hancock suggested it will soon get to the stage where the festive greetings “could either be for Christmas just gone or this year”.
One of i‘s journalists received nine Christmas cards on Thursday that had been posted in early December. There was also a letter from a debt collection firm requesting payment of an energy bill owed by the previous occupant of her flat. The letter was dated 26 November.
More than 115,000 Royal Mail workers from the Communication Workers Union participated in several days of strike action during December as part of a continuing pay dispute.
Royal Mail has denied reports that the company ordered staff to prioritise parcels over letters and cards in the run-up to Christmas – though its own chief executive, Simon Thompson, said in a TV interview that the business was more focused on parcels than letters.
“We used to be a letters business,” Mr Thompson told Sky News’s Kay Burley. “We are now a parcels business.”
Faced with a deluge of complaints, Royal Mail confirmed that although it has delivered “the vast majority” of Christmas post, some areas still have not received their cards – and the company did not know when they would arrive.
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“Every item of mail is important to Royal Mail,” it said in a statement.
“We apologise to any customer who has been impacted by the industrial action that took place over the festive period. We would like to thank all colleagues who helped to keep the mail moving during that time. We have been working hard to get our service back to where we and our customers expect it to be and we are making good progress.
“While we have now delivered the vast majority of Christmas mail, we recognise that in some local areas our service may still be subject to some delays, and we are working to fix this as soon as we are able.”
The statement added: “We continue to seek a resolution to the dispute with the CWU so that we can avoid any more damaging strike action in the future.”
