Of “Miracles” and Christmas Ornaments
“God, if you exist, I need a Christmas miracle.” I actually said that out loud, while laying on my bed in the dark, after an exhausting day at my last in-person Christmas market of the year.
It wasn’t just that my ornament sales were only a third of what they had been in previous years. I get that the economy is tough, people are struggling and ornaments are not an essential item. I also had several personal, spiritual and health issues to deal with, was witnessing the decline in the health of people I love, and was feeling the soul-crushing malaise of a world at war and the evil in people’s hearts toward their fellow human beings.
Previously, I had made it through some pretty serious health issues of my own with my faith intact. Granted, I had been extremely annoyed and had given God a piece of my mind on several occasions. But after questioning and wrestling, I always came through with an even stronger faith and belief that God is good, all the time.
But for some reason, this time was different.
For the past six months, I was having serious existential doubts. How can “believers” in Jesus get some things so wrong and treat people in such un-Christlike ways? Why do people think their path, their theology, their way to worship, is the only “right” way? Why does God allow injustice? I’ve contemplated these questions before, arriving at all the typical answers. But this time I kept coming back to this: Maybe… it’s because God doesn’t exist in the first place and the notion of God is all in our heads. I stopped praying. Why bother if there’s no one there? I was feeling pretty lost and low. That’s when I gave it one more go and insolently asked the God I wanted to believe in for a miracle.
Hello? Is Anybody Out There?
The next day a series of events unfolded to give pause to my disbelief.
One of my customers at my last in-person Christmas market bought a Vancouver Special ornament and gave it to her husband, a collector of my ornaments, who happens to be an editor of the Vancouver Sun. He posted a photo of it on Twitter (X), which got quite a few comments, and decided to assign an article to a journalist, Joe Ruttle, who interviewed me the next day. Joe asked for a high-resolution photo in case they decided to run it. I knew exactly when it was published online because my order notifications started lighting up. Sales went into overdrive the next day when the story, Local artisan’s Vancouver Special Christmas tree ornaments a hot seller this season, appeared in both the Vancouver Sun and The Province print editions.
I Get by with a Little Help from My Friends
I knew I couldn’t fulfill that many orders without help. I put out an S.O.S. on Facebook to my friends, and they rallied around me. Claire came on Wednesday to help box ornaments. Tonya, Jane, Tracey, Karen, Liesel and Janice came on Thursday to help paint and box ornaments, label orders and shuttle them to the pickup location. Sharon, Lisa and Cindy came on Friday to do more boxing until I was caught up enough to manage the rest on my own. Throughout this crunch period, my husband took time off from his recording studio work to help me fulfil mail orders and deliver them to the post office. And the staff — particularly Linda —at Windermere Market, the location for local pickup of online orders, were amazing at handling the growing waves of orders and requests.
Chaos, and Understanding Customers
In the deluge of ornament sales, I was working until 2 a.m. every night and, in my exhaustion, started making mistakes. One customer received a Water Taxi ornament instead of their Science World ornament. One had the wrong mailing label attached to their shipment and received a crow instead of a Vancouver Special. With another, I missed providing a bonus ornament for subscribing. For two orders, I gave customers too many ornaments (which they graciously returned). Some Woodward’s ornaments that needed to have the hangers re-glued were accidentally boxed and delivered before they were glued. Many customers had to wait for me to paint details on the Vancouver Specials before I could fulfill their orders, and I had to notify some customers they might not get their order at all unless a box of lost ornaments was found. I had accidentally oversold them because I forgot to account for the sales at my last in-person market. All that, plus I had glitches with my fulfillment platform and had to do manual work-arounds to notify customers that their orders were ready to pick up.
However, I owned up to my mistakes as soon as I realized I made them, and I made it right for my customers. Unlike my own experience with UPS.
A Lost Box of 100 Vancouver Special Ornaments
As many of you may have heard, I received a delivery by UPS of my long-awaited Vancouver Special ornaments. I was on my way home from my eldest son’s basketball tournament in Langley, and my youngest son was waiting at home at the door to receive the ornaments, which came a day earlier than scheduled. He took a photo of the boxes and immediately sent it to me. There were three boxes; I was supposed to get four. Within minutes, I let my supplier know that a box was missing and went online to the UPS tracking system to alert them to the missing box. I checked back daily, figuring it would eventually be located and redirected to me. I wasn’t in a big hurry as I had enough made to last three years, or so I thought. Then the Vancouver Sun and The Province articles came out… and it was clear I was going to sell out!
That’s when my friend and I got on the phone to UPS to find out what happened to that last box of 100 ornaments. After a least an hour on the phone with various agents and escalating several tiers, we were told by a UPS customer service person that my box had been misdelivered to the Amazon warehouse at 4189 Salish Way in Delta. Yay! We knew where it was! We thought we could just get them to pick it up and deliver it to me.
Not So Fast
Nope. For whatever reason, they could not pick it up from the Amazon warehouse and re-deliver it or release it to me and allow me to pick it up myself. They needed the permission of the shipper to release it, despite the fact that I own the contents of the box, it was addressed to me, and I was ultimately the one who had paid for the shipping. To be fair, all the delivery companies are the same in this regard; it’s a deeply flawed system where the receiver of goods has little to no rights because the agreements are all with the shipper.
The case was escalated to the UPS investigations department, who could not see on their systems where the package was located, despite the fact that the customer service people could. I called daily to the UPS investigations department. Then I was told that the investigation was complete, but they would not tell me the result of the investigation. I asked what the typical steps are after an investigation is complete, and the UPS agent told me they contacted the shipper to fill out the “paperwork.” When I inquired as to who exactly they contacted and how, they would not give me any information at first, then said they had notified the shipper by letter. Letter?!! When I pressed, they admitted they also sent an email but would not give me the email address they contacted, as they said it was someone’s personal name (which I later learned was not true).
It took several days of constant interrogation of the investigations team for me to discover that technically, the shipper was not my supplier overseas, but a forwarding agent in Canada. Up until that point, every time I got a small piece of information to relay to my supplier, it was one-day delay due to the time difference. At first UPS wouldn’t tell me who the forwarder in Canada was. Eventually I was able to pry the company name out of them and that they were located in North York, but the company name didn’t match the one I got from my supplier since it was a Canadian subsidiary. I convinced the UPS agent to give me the suffix of the email address, and from that was able to narrow it down to three possible companies in North York. I navigated through an automated voice system and left several voicemail messages with random recipients, none of which sounded like they were the right person to speak with.
Meanwhile, my supplier sent me an automated response they received from the forwarder that indicated that the investigation was closed, had moved to claims and they were going to pay me out for the ornaments – despite the fact that both UPS and I knew that the ornaments were at the Amazon warehouse in Delta. A call back to the UPS investigations confirmed that the case had moved to claims and, of course, I could not speak to anyone in claims. The only UPS contact point in claims is an email address that spews an automated response that indicates you won’t hear from them any time soon.
Giving Up on UPS and Trying Amazon
Once I realized UPS was a complete dead end, I tried calling the Amazon warehouse using a phone number listed in Google but it never went through. I later learned from the warehouse that the phone number on Google was “fake.” I had tried calling Amazon’s customer service to get a number for someone in logistics, but their customer service agents in Canada (and the US) could not find a company directory for anyone in the warehouse, and after exhausting those options they Googled it themselves and gave me the same “fake” number I had found. When we did get someone in logistics/tracking, they could not find the package because it wasn’t scanned into their system since it was not an Amazon order.
So, after two weeks of trying to go through the proper channels, I took things into my own hands and went outside the system. I emailed consumer reporters who I thought could help. I reached out to a few on-air personalities at radio stations that I thought warehouse employees might listen to, hoping they’d put a call out over the air. Then I turned to social media.
Facebook for the Win
While I was preparing a social media post, my husband drove out to the Amazon warehouse to speak to someone directly. We learned that UPS drivers often “dump” packages at Amazon. Amazon’s typical protocol is to call UPS and have them pick up and redeliver them. However, at this time of year, there are hundreds of boxes. They don’t get taken into Amazon’s warehouse because they were never intended to be delivered there. They get piled up near the receiving dock until they can be dealt with. Based on that information, I figured there were a few possible scenarios, the most likely of which was that my box was stacked in a heap with hundreds of other boxes at the receiving dock. If I could just get hold of someone at the Amazon warehouse, I was sure they could find it.
I published social media posts on Facebook and Twitter to try and reach someone at the Amazon warehouse. Because of the algorithms, not that many people saw the post, so I sent out an email to my subscriber list asking them to like, share and comment on my post to get more visibility and to let me know if they knew anyone at the warehouse. When someone suggested I post on Reddit, I asked for their help to do so.
My Facebook post asking for the public’s help to find my ornaments.
Since my Facebook post still wasn’t getting enough traction, I decided to “boost” the post. I paid about $20 to display my post for 24 hours to people active on Facebook in the community of Delta. I was actually able to specifically target Amazon employees there.
Meanwhile, I’m now dealing with social media teams at both UPS and Amazon who are eager to take this issue offline, but cannot help me because I have already exhausted all the regular supports and keep getting put into a never-ending loop that ultimately leads to dead-ends I have already explored.
I knew what I needed: a hero at the Amazon warehouse!
Not All Heroes Wear Capes – Some Wear Steel-Toed Boots
Enter Ben Strickland and Brock Pedersen from Amazon’s warehouse in Delta. Both contacted me independently to offer support and get all the necessary details to identify my box. They searched the hundreds of packages at the receiving dock and team member Kiera found mine! At the end of his shift, Ben personally delivered my box of Vancouver Special ornaments.
More Media and More Orders
That same night, evening producer Raynaldo Suarez with CityNews 1130 in Vancouver was following my social feeds and reached out to interview me for a story, Vancouver ornament maker thankful to Amazon workers who found lost shipment, which ran the next day.
Vancouver is Awesome was going to do a story, but then a PR spokesperson from UPS contacted them saying, “We’ve been informed that the customer now has the package,” which effectively killed the story. Doing his due diligence, the reporter followed up to ask if UPS delivered it. UPS failed to mention that it was Amazon that delivered the package, not UPS.
I understand why VIA decided not to run the story — that’s their prerogative. But I still think the real story wasn’t just that the ornaments were found, but how they were found and the lengths I had to go to – outside the system – to get them. Ultimately, it was three caring people at the Amazon warehouse going out of their way to help someone in need. Where “the system” fails, the kindness of strangers can make all the difference.
That was the story that CBC ran, with Gloria Macarenko from CBC’s On the Coast doing a live interview with me that afternoon.
I spent another couple of late nights painting ornaments and began fulfilling the remaining orders, including some on the wait list of over 300 people. Based on the overwhelming response, I will be restocking my Vancouver Special ornaments in 2024. My subscriber list has more than doubled and I have had so many kind, understanding and caring emails from people who saw the posts and reached out to encourage me.
A “Hallmark Movie” Kind of Story
Some folks have been joking that it is the Hallmark movie they didn’t know they needed to watch. Or, with tongue in cheek and a glint in their eyes, have called it a “Christmas miracle.”
I am fully aware that “miracle” may be too strong of a word considering what’s going on in the world. Why would God answer my comparatively insignificant request? I’m not sure. Could all of this have been a coincidence? Yes, I suppose so. But when I pray, I see more than my fair share of these “coincidences.” I needed that reminder and I believe this particular answer to prayer was God’s grace extended to me, despite my doubt and lack of faith, or maybe because of it.
This whole chain of events has met three pretty important needs for me: the practical need of paying the mortgage, the psychological need of experiencing the kindness of strangers, and the spiritual need of a small sign to show that God sees me and is still “on the job” despite whatever else might be happening in my life or the world around me.
Thank you to everyone who God used to help answer my prayers for a Christmas miracle. I am grateful for you.
Updated Dec. 29 for clarity.
Note to readers: You are free to comment and share your personal opinions that may be different from mine. However, I am not interested in debating, and any comments posted that are derogatory, unkind or in poor taste will be deleted.