Postie on overtime to deliver gifts

Greytown rural postie Brian Sugrue put in some extra hours on Christmas Eve to deliver parcels before Christmas. PHOTO/ANDREW BONALLACK

A rural postie brightened Christmas Day for Wairarapa families when he made a second round of Christmas Eve deliveries, putting in extra hours simply because "it was just the right thing to do".

Greytown's rural postman, Brian Sugrue, has been likened to Santa Claus for the Christmas Eve mission by the Morison family, who had one special present delivered on time because of the extra hours Mr Sugrue worked.

"We'd already had the morning post delivered, but he arrived again that evening," Greytown mother Trish Morison said.

"I went outside and he had dropped this parcel at the door, and I said, 'Oh, that's really lovely, I can't believe that it's arrived on time'."

The present was a target net for her daughter, Emily, who has been selected for the New Zealand under-17 women's football squad.

Mrs Morison said Emily had been recovering from a leg injury and needed to get as much target practice as possible before she went on training camp with the squad next week.

"She's got to go on January 8, so there wouldn't have been much chance to use it before she goes to this camp, where she obviously has to perform at her best.

"So the second round of deliveries was pretty special. It's kind of a cool present to have got at that time rather than having to wait until next week when she would have missed a whole week's worth of goal-shooting practice."

Mrs Morison said Mr Sugrue's efforts were "lovely" and that, without him, people wouldn't have got anything until Tuesday.

"I'm sure there were a lot of presents that wouldn't have got to where they were supposed to go on time without him."

Mr Sugrue has been working as Greytown's rural postman since September but said it took him until November to "actually get [his] head around the whole thing".

"I was reading power meters before that and with the rural post round you've got to try to remember who wants junk mail, who doesn't, who gets the Times-Age, who gets Dominions -- it's quite a big learning curve," he said.

"I'm pretty all right now, though. I've got around 400 customers. Leading up to Christmas, I was delivering 70-80 parcels a day in the Greytown rural area."

Mr Sugrue said he had been working long days leading up to Christmas but when he returned to the post depot on Christmas Eve after his morning deliveries and saw that there were "still so many parcels", he "just went out and did it".

"I thought, 'I should go out and deliver them so people can get their parcels.' Otherwise they would have been sitting here until after Christmas and I thought, 'That's not very good'."