This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

It's Christmas morning. You're probably kicked back, watching family rip into their loot, thankful that the spending is over and Amazon got it to you on time.

If you're a kid, you're giddy to the point of incontinence that for an old fat guy, Santa is still pretty good at cramming himself into chimneys and furnace flues.

Almost none of you is thinking about 18-year postal veteran Ben Frost or any of his thousands of co-workers at the United States Postal Service in Utah. If you got everything you wanted for Christmas, chances are that they had more to do with it than actual reindeer or Amazons.

Thursday, Dec. 22, was the busiest mail day of the year for the USPS. To see what mail carriers have to go through to keep Christmas jolly for everyone, I followed Ben around on his walking route.

Prior to this, my experience with actual mail carriers was limited to tormenting them with mailbox pranks. One of these pranks resulted in a visit from a couple of guys in suits who explained that interfering with the mail was a federal crime.

That didn't scare me. The fact that they knew the Old Man did. Fifty years later, I was still traumatized enough to remind Ben to not let me touch any mail.

We delivered to a hundred or so residences in the area of 4200 South and 800 East. Ben's mailbag was large enough to lug a small bison, and contained an enormous amount of mail — of which only about 26 percent was more or less real mail.

The rest of Ben's load was junk mail that still had to be delivered with the same degree of reverence as mail that contained actual news and money.

After eight years of delivering mail to these homes (including the dreaded Christmas seasons) Ben is familiar with most of his "customers." He knows which ones are waiting for checks, who has what kind of dogs, and when to become concerned if the mail starts to pile up.

"I get attached to some people," Ben said.

It was a grim day — overcast, breezy and cold. But as they say, "neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

There's nothing in that famous saying about dogs and other pets, or wild spiders and snakes. Ben has never been bitten by a dog, but that doesn't mean delivering the mail is risk-free. He was once set upon by a savage duck.

Me: "Did you squirt it with pepper spray?"

Him "No. A little old lady stopped and beat it with her purse."

Nothing that exciting happened while I was with Ben. It was mostly about getting the mail — cards, bills, and small packages — to those who depended on him. It's more challenging than you might think.

The most aggravating thing for Ben (and presumably every other mail carrier in the country) are partial addresses. It drives them crazy.

"If all I have is a street address, but there are a hundred units at that address, I have to climb a lot of stairs to find which one it is," he said.

That would drive a guy like me crazy and cause your mail to be delivered to a nearby culvert. Not mail carriers. They have to make sure that it gets where it's supposed to go.

So, if you're relaxed and feeling comfortable with your Christmas right now, remember that it wasn't all delivered onto your roof by magic. Take a minute and think about who got it there, then remember to thank them.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.