Santa hasn’t even left the country yet, but Christmas is already literally and figuratively around the corner for postal worker Hanneke van Hastenberg. Since this week, there has been a talking mailbox at her house on Componistenlaan in Sint-Oedenrode. “They can also go to the regular mailboxes, but this is more fun.”
“This is my job, every day,” says Hanneke while cycling through the streets of her village. She has been a postman for over seven years and delivers all the mail to her fellow villagers five days a week. “But now they come to my house.”
For several days now, there has been a bright orange mailbox at her front door. “It’s noticeable here, in the middle of the sidewalk. The mailbox is specifically there to put Christmas cards in.”
The initiative for the Christmas mailboxes came from the postal deliverers themselves. The campaign must ensure solidarity, especially during this festive month. After the call for people who would like to have such a bus on their doorstep, hundreds of registrations were received. “I gave up on myself then,” says Hanneke.
“And I am one of the chosen ones,” she adds proudly. And rightly so, because there are only twelve of these special mailboxes in the entire country. One in each province. “Maybe it attracted attention that I added that I have a nice nativity scene on the wall.”
Now, of course, there are regular postal mailboxes throughout the village. “But this one is much more fun. This is a magical mailbox. If you put a card in it, you hear a sound. This gives you a nice magical start to Christmas.”
To make it heard, Hanneke puts in a Christmas card herself. When she opens the lid of the letterbox, she soon hears: ‘Christmas card inside, a fairytale beginning. And of course with a closing, as it often sounds at Holle Bolle Gijs in the Efteling ‘Thank you’.
And in the meantime, the postman from Sint-Oedenrode continues to deliver the mail. “You enjoy moving and chatting with people. Sometimes people tell whole life stories, like recently with an older woman in her driveway. She talked about how she had experienced the war as a child.”
These are the icing on the cake for Hanneke. “A colleague of mine recently explained our work at a primary school in the area. At the end of her story she said that you should always wave and shout at a postman. This week I cycled past that primary school and all those children were standing in the schoolyard waving and shouting.”
“Those are the fun things,” she adds. As well as this project right in front of her house. “I hear him talking from the toilet, which is right above the mailbox. But he’s only just got there, so I haven’t heard it much yet. It would be nice if people came to bring a Christmas card.”
The mailbox will remain on the sidewalk in front of Hanneke’s house at Componistenlaan 2 in Sint-Oedenrode until Friday, December 19.
