FORT WORTH, Texas - Santa Claus never had to haul 400 ostriches to China. He left that chore to FedEx.
"We had to bag their heads," said Ramiro Gonzalez, a senior manager at the FedEx Alliance Airport hub. "They would freak out if they could see."
Nor did St. Nick ever haul a live killer whale. Ask UPS about that one.
"Remember Free Willy?" asked John Manning, a United Parcel Service spokesman in Dallas. "We shipped Keiko the whale from Mexico to Oregon. And I know, from being a driver once, that we deliver live lobsters."
Yesterday, these two couriers were handling an estimated 24 million packages nationwide, the busiest shipping day of the year, let alone the mailing-crazed holiday season.
The load will include Aunt Sally's Christmas fruitcake, packed in dry ice, which tends to release carbon monoxide and must be handled with special care. Then there are the hams, Christmas trees, even surfboards - boxed up and shipped overnight, mostly because of the huge popularity of online shopping.
Remember what washed ashore in Castaway? It isn't all Christmas cards and socks.
"I saw one whole plane come in with nothing but fresh flowers," said Rebecca Shaw, a FedEx spokesman. "Auto parts. Fresh foods. You wouldn't believe it."
Normally modest in their brown shirts and dog-dodging shorts, UPS boasted that it would deliver 18 million parcels by the close of business yesterday, or roughly one package per American child younger than 5.
That takes an extra 60,000 seasonal workers added to its 360,000 work force - not to mention 256 UPS planes, 328 charter planes and 88,000 cars, trucks, tractors and motorcycles in its worldwide fleet.
At Alliance, FedEx packages shoot through a system of chutes and conveyors more complicated than anything Willy Wonka could imagine.
They fly down the conveyors at the speed of a semi on a highway, and once a scanner reads the bar codes, an electronic arm pops out of the wall and knocks each package down the appropriate chute, where it winds its way into a pile of boxes all bound for the same place.
FedEx asserts that only one package out of 5,000 is mis-sorted, and that nothing arriving on one plane spends more than 3 1/2 hours at the hub before it is whisked away again.
"I started delivering until 10 at night on Christmas Eve, and this is my 17th peak season," Gonzalez said. "It gets in your blood."
Christmas tends to double the hazardous material that FedEx ships, mostly because of all the dry ice.
The materials are stacked in a separate section, waiting for shipment, and categorized according to the type of danger. Flammable liquids are over here, flammable solids over there, dangerous-when-wet items over here. Once it comes through Alliance, it is placed in special sections on the planes, away from other nasty items.
"You might have a radioactive," Gonzalez said. "You don't want to put that next to someone's X-ray."
"We ship anything except firearms and bombs," said Bob Russey, service assistance agent. "During horse-race season ... we'll put [horses to be shipped] out in the shade and pet them."
Each company promises that any package's location can be found quickly along its path. UPS expects a record 12 million online requests today, far beyond the average rate of about 7 million.
There is one other benefit for non-Santa shipping. UPS and FedEx drivers tend to eat fewer cookies, and you won't have to clean your chimney.