Maybe? I gave my mail carrier and (package) delivery people boxes of chocolate last week, so feel free to reinstate the tradition if you miss them.
In the early 2000s, my brother was in some financial straits and took on the extra job of throwing papers each morning. A couple weeks before Christmas he would include a personalized Christmas card with each paper. That would prompt dozens of cards with cash gifts from his customers. Apparently they really appreciated how conscientious he was about the job.
Which one?
This thread reminds me of a joke:
Two women are sitting around the table one morning fretting about the upcoming holidays.
“I never know what to get people,” says one. “Especially the people you run into each day. Like, what the hell am I supposed to get the mailman?”
“Oh, that one’s easy,” replies the other. “This year, for the mailman, I had sex with him, made him breakfast, and then gave him a dollar.”
“You what?! Sex with the mailman?! Are you crazy? What if your husband found out?”
“Found out? He told me to do it! See, I was having the same type of conversation with him that we’re having. I asked him what I should do for the mailman for Christmas, and he said, ‘Fuck ‘em. Give him a dollar.’ Breakfast was my idea!”
WW II. She got a fridge probably in 1945.
My son was the neighborhood daily newspaper carrier 20 years ago, and fondly remembers getting those Christmas tips. I told him we couldn’t leave town for the holiday, lest he’d miss getting the tips.
We no longer get a daily paper, but we still have a Sunday paper delivered. I tried to leave a card for the carrier, but he missed seeing it. Nowadays there’s a spot when you renew that allows for the tip. We’ll do that next time.
I’m a natural blond. Back when I first heard that one, the wife was a blond of course! I still laughed, it was funny 
Our mail carrier does a crappy job, so no tip for her.
Our private company garbage guys have been picking up our trash since we got here and do what we consider to be a good job, so I watched for them the week before Christmas and gave them both cash.
The guy who delivers our heavy Chewy boxes and always puts them where we want them? He got cash and a bottle of mead. (He also delivered the heavy glass mead fermenting jugs while I was there and rang the bell to tell me that he could hear broken glass in the box. As we were discussing the package and contents, he told me that he loved mead. We don’t hand it out to just everyone.)
Our housekeeper gets tipped a month’s wages, but I tip my hair dresser every time she cuts my hair so don’t feel the obligation to give a Christmas tip.
My weed delivery guy also gets tipped every delivery, but when he delivered before Christmas, I gave him a bottle of mead as well…for the same reason as the Chewy (FedEx) guy.
I started my work life as a newspaper girl, then skated around a parking lot serving burgers. I can still remember how much I appreciated each and every one of the tips I got. Now that I am in a place in my life that I can comfortably over-tip, I indulge myself.
I am in the UK where we don’t tend to tip much, but Christmas was the exception. When I got married in the 1980s, and we moved into our current house, we used to tip the postman (a character who wore shorts all year, even in the snow - and note that we get our mail pushed through a letterbox in our front door). We had no personal relationship with the dustmen, but we (and most of our neighbours) taped a card on the bin with paper money in it. The young person who delivered the papers got money, but that’s about it.
This year, the only “tip” was the box of chocs I gave to the team at our supermarket click-and-collect.
Not here. “Christmas boxes” are still a thing even if Boxing Day is no longer dedicated to that purpose. This year, there were the bin men, postlady, neighbourhood guards, gardener and cleaner, as well as teachers.
The bin men here organize the year-end moneys collectively. There’s even a receipt book.
My BiL was a postman until retiring a couple of years ago; his round was pretty rural and included some large country houses, including a few celebrity homes. He used to get a ton of tips at Christmas - money, bottles of port, hampers, whole game birds, boxes of chocolates, etc.
Every year my wife and I give a very nice holiday gift to the teachers of our two children (seventh and fourth grades respectively). We’re talking a bottle of good champagne or cremant plus a side of something sweet like a box of macarons or a package of Belgian chocolate truffles.
I think some of these gifts/tips have changed because the services we get and the way we receive them and pay for them have changed - when I was a kid, if we had groceries/prescriptions, etc. delivered, it was an employee of the store and possibly the same person every time, so of course I would tip the delivery person when it was delivered and also a Christmas tip if I got regular deliveries. The newspaper carrier collected in person every week and got a tip every week and a Christmas tip. My grandmother went to have her hair done every week, so of course her stylist got a Christmas tip. Now, I get my hair cut three or four times a year and none of them may be anywhere near Christmas. My prescriptions and some grocery items get delivered by Amazon/UPS/USPS , a different person each time, who I don’t normally even see as they leave the box on my stoop. The newspaper sends me a bill, to which I can add a tip, but I haven’t seen the carrier in at least 5 years and would have no idea who I was leaving a gift for if I left cash in an envelope ( which he/she wouldn’t see, as they throw the paper from a car and which might get stolen) - has this person been delivering to me all year or did they just take over last week?
Those lists of who to tip are still published - but assumptions are made in those articles that makes them not that useful to me. Holiday gifts are supposed to be for people who provide regular service - you give a holiday gift ( in addition to the normal tip) to the waitress who serves three times a week at the diner, but not to one at the restaurant you go to three times a year. FedEx/UPS/USPS - now that I am retired and occasionally see these people (they still don’t ring the bell so it’s just chance) , I know that I don’t have a single person delivering from these services for any length of time, and if I leave a gift/tip in the mailbox for the mail carrier, it might go to someone who just started delivering my mail last week. But when I worked it was the same person delivering every day in person for months or years , so in that circumstance a holiday gift made sense.
One Christmas years ago, our power went out. It was a fuse on a poll. The guy that fixed it got an unopened bottle of vodka or tequila or something from me. Probably should not do that anymore. Otherwise, we don’t get mail delivery or garbage pick up, so nothing there.
Well, next time, wait until after he climbs down from the pole…
Gee i don’t think so. The guy who delivers the newspaper still gives us an envelope around the holidays, and we generally put something in it. We gave the cleaning cleaning lady a double payment around Christmas, by way of a tip. We also told her not to come this week, and sent her a check anyway.
I’ve chatted with both the letter carrier and the women who takes away our garbage. We don’t tip the letter carrier because it’s illegal, but most years we tip the garbage service person. I’m not sure if we have this year. Hmm, I’ll check with my husband. She does a very good job, and I’d like to tip her. (She’s better than the guy who did it before the company was sold. Maybe not as good as the guy before him.)
My ex BIL has been a mailman for many years. Back in the 80’s he delivered mail to a well to do neighborhood. He would end up with many bottles of liquor and wine from the folks in this neighborhood. He would pass the cheap stuff off onto my sisters family and give his family the good stuff. He kept giving me bottles of gin. I don’t like gin. The bottles, many unopened, would end up in the trash a few months later.
Do you have more fun ?
Broken glass in your weed is bad.
I really don’t have anyone to tip for my one person/cat household. But at work we will tip the postal carrier if they are consistently our carrier because we do regular international correspondence and shipping. Some years the carrier is not consistent though. We also tip our regular UPS driver, the key is getting a driver to claim our route. We have had several good and two great drivers but when a different driver is doing our route every day service does decline.
I asked my gf just now if she gave our mailman (lady) anything. She loves our local turkey farm as much as I do, so she bought five $20 gift certificates for the store and gave them to local service people. She has two still ungiven, so I guess we’ll use those.