New York, Dec 16 (THAINDIAN NEWS) For the upcoming festival season, the post office has set shipping deadlines for the Christmas holiday, so late shoppers should be aware of the 2009 Post Office has announced regarding “must ship by” dates for domestic mail:

For those of you wanting to stick to good old parcel post, get your packages in TODAY, Wednesday, Dec. 16.

First Class and Priority mail packages must be sent no later than Mon., Dec. 21, and Express mail packages (which usually arrive “next day”) must go by Wednesday Dec. 23.

Shipping company workers have said that more packages are expected to be delivered in the United States during the impending holiday season as compared to the previous year.

John Dunavant, who is the vice president of Memphis operations for FedEx, said that his company is expecting to deliver 13 million packages when the holiday shipping week begins on Monday, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

The predicted number of packages that would be delivered this year would be quite high this year, compared to 12 million packages that the FedEx delivered during its busiest shipping day last year. “We always had the capacity,” Dunavant said, “but this year we surely expect the aircraft to be more full.”

The United Parcel Service is also pulling up its socks to cope up with the increase in deliveries this year. UPS spokeswoman Karen Cole told the Times while her company suffered a sad holiday season in 2008, an increase in holiday shipping is predicted for this year. “We’re predicting between Thanksgiving and Christmas that we’ll deliver 400 million packages total, and that’s slightly up from last year,” Cole said.