Pure Christmas stress: This is how Aichach deliverers cope with the holidays!

Pure Christmas stress: This is how Aichach deliverers cope with the holidays!

Today, December 25, 2025, the festive season for many is not only characterized by conviviality and good food, but also by hectic parcel traffic. While the families celebrate Christmas, the delivery people from DHL and other parcel services are in constant use. It's worth taking a look at the everyday life of a delivery person, and in the case of Thomas Gamperl it quickly becomes clear: for him the Christmas season starts earlier than for most people.

Gamperl is a parcel and letter deliverer for Deutsche Post and works at the base in the Acht300 business park between Aichach and Dasing. For him, the pre-Christmas period extends until Epiphany and is often accompanied by a state of emergency. Three months characterized by stressful deliveries and a large volume of packages. Gamperl has a good knack for keeping calm in the midst of Christmas stress and delivering the freight on time.

The challenge of parcel delivery

Before the Christmas season, DHL, Hermes and Co. have their hands full. The first packages arrived at the beginning of December 2023, and the high volume of work, especially after Black Friday, posed challenges for the delivery staff. Despite extensive preparations, complications arose when long-distance transports did not work overnight or the recipients were not at home.

Especially with DHL, a package is usually delivered by around midday on Christmas Eve. The current status of a package can be easily queried via the Deutsche Post website. All you have to do is enter the tracking number to find out whether the package is already on its way. From around 10 a.m. you can often see the status “The shipment has been loaded into the delivery vehicle”, which means that the delivery people have set off to deliver the Christmas surprises. Deutsche Post's practical tracking system makes it possible to track both letters and parcels, which is a great relief for many customers.

Parcel services in comparison

The competition never sleeps, and Hermes and DPD also deliver on Christmas Eve. Hermes shows in the tracking that the shipment is in the process of being delivered and that the deliverers are often on the road until the evening hours. DPD, on the other hand, focuses primarily on express parcels, while GLS no longer delivers parcels on this day.

• DHL: Liefert bis mittags, Status „Die Sendung wurde in das Zustellfahrzeug geladen“.
• Hermes: Zusteller aktiv bis in die Abendstunden, Status „Die Sendung befindet sich in der Zustellung“.
• DPD: Fokus auf Express-Pakete, Standard-Pakete eventuell am Folgetag.
• GLS: Keine Auslieferungen an Heiligabend.

Regardless of the service, they all have one thing in common: the stress is high and time is of the essence. If someone is not at home, many parcel services try to deliver the parcels to neighbors or leave them in parcel shops. Another point that is important for delivery people: They cannot be held liable for lost packages if the recipient gives permission to drop them off and the packages are simply left at the door.

The background to this stressful time is often overlooked when we focus on what's important: the celebration. But for delivery workers like Thomas Gamperl, these months are a menagerie of challenges. They take it with a smile and the goal of ensuring that everything arrives on time and makes people happy - even if it sometimes means fighting through Christmas traffic.