I recently noticed that I’m the only one on my street who clears the snow off the top of their mailbox, meaning the poor letter carrier must get snow on her hands and down her sleeves while delivering everyone else’s mail. Brrr!
Postcrossers are probably more likely than the general population to already be doing this, but I just thought I’d mention it I was kind of shocked to realize how many people shovel the snow on the ground away so a car can pull up to the box, but completely forget about the snow on top of the box itself.
If you know of other mailbox etiquette that might be overlooked, you can post that in this thread too. (Hopefully I’m not about to find out I’m doing something just as inconsiderate as my neighbors )
Whenever it snows I make sure to shovel a path to the mailbox (it is on my house). I figured it makes it easier for the postman to at least walk up to our house even if it is just a little bit of snow.
We get no significant snowfall at city level here. Rarely, in the depths of winter, we may get a ‘snow day’…which sometimes results in a very light snow dusting on the ground (think icing sugar sprinkled on a cake)…so it never poses an issue for postbox access. Still, everyone runs outside to ‘play’ in the ‘snow’ .
The thing I need to remember to do is clear out the spider webs! As I use a postbox…the old letterbox sits quietly empty for long periods and gets taken over by spiders (I’ve not paid particular attention to what sort live in there…we have huntsmen, redbacks, whitetails and some other nasty looking dudes that I haven’t identified…all living hereabouts).
Every so often someone will send something to our street address and then both the poor postie and I have to fight the bitey critters and webs, in order to deliver/receive the mail . It’s like a built in security system!
That is a bit off topic, as it is not my personal mailbox (which is inside the block of flats where I live, so no need to clear snow off it), but maybe because people don’t care or because it can look really pretty.
This is where I mailed all my snailmail for a long time:
I was kind of shocked to realize how many people shovel the snow on the ground away so a car can pull up to the box, but completely forget about the snow on top of the box itself.
)
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. It’s like a built in security system!