Do you have your Christmas shopping list completed yet? You might want to get on it if you haven't.
Canada Post says the deadline to ship packages and have a guaranteed delivery date before Christmas could be earlier than usual this year thanks to the pandemic.
The corporation has been experiencing near-Christmas-level shipping volumes throughout the pandemic due to many people staying at home and shopping online.
"Christmas started way earlier this year," said spokesperson Jon Hamilton. "Usually that sounds like a good thing or something like a Hallmark movie, but it just meant we were incredibly busy all year as people stayed home, trying to fight COVID and became very comfortable shopping online."
Hamilton says there's still time before a deadline is put in place to guarantee your package arrives ahead of Christmas Day, but avoiding a backlog will be the best way to ensure a good Christmas for Canadians this year.
"With more and more people planning to do their shopping online, there's only so much capacity to process and deliver," Hamilton said. "If everyone waits until the last minute, which is another holiday tradition in Canada, or waits until the Cyber Monday, you could see a surge that could cause delays. Obviously we want to avoid that, we want to give businesses and Canadians a good Christmas to end a really tough year."
Overall Hamilton says this is not the year to leave your Christmas shopping to the last minute.