The story was told to me by a former deliveryman named John.

The Christmas season was the busiest time of year for delivery-persons. Drivers saw a major uptick in workload. This did nothing to improve John’s sunny disposition.

At Christmastime, John was about as cheerful as the infamous storybook character who once purloined Yuletide from Whoville.

One night, at the end of a shift, John was making final deliveries in a rundown apartment complex. There was a little girl, standing outside the building, waiting for him.

“Did you bring anything for me?” she asked in a small Who-voice.

“What’s your apartment number?” he spat back.

She told him. He rifled through his packages. “Nothing here for you.”

The girl was crestfallen.

After he finished deliveries on foot, the girl was still standing on the curb beside his truck.

“Maybe it got lost,” she said. “Don’t packages get lost sometimes?”

“No,” he said.

“Not even sometimes?”

“No.”

She was now his shadow. The girl wouldn’t leave his side. She kept asking about her package.

Finally, he turned to face her. “Listen, I’m really busy tonight. You need to write down the tracking number and call the company.”

The little girl turned to walk away, hangdog.

He felt one inch tall.

“Wait,” he called. “Let me look in the back of my truck, just to be sure.”

He knew the package was not in his truck, of course, but he saw no harm in digging through parcels in his truck, pretending.

The girl was patiently waiting outside the vehicle, chatting up a storm.

“It’s a Christmas tree,” she said. “We ordered an inflatable tree. You blow it up.”

“You should always write down your tracking number,” he said. “That way you can follow your package.”

“We’ve never had a Christmas tree before because my mom says we can’t afford one. And they’re messy.

“Plus, Mom’s never home, she’s always at her boyfriend’s house. But she let my brother and me order a blow-up tree on her phone. It was super cheap.”

“A blow-up tree?”

“It’s actually a tree-shaped float for swimming pools. It cost $8. My brother and me are going to decorate it with paper. We’ve never decorated a tree before. Have you found it yet?”

He sighed. He finally admitted to her that there was no package in his truck. He could almost hear her little heart breaking.

“Listen,” he said, “Tell your mom to write down the tracking number, and contact Amazon. There’s really nothing I can do.”

For the rest of the night, he could not get her out of his mind. As he navigated traffic, lost in a sea of headlights, he thought of her. He thought of her with each delivery he made that evening. And even as he rested his head on his pillow, she was on his mind.

There are some in this world who have plenty. There are others who have not. Sometimes, the latter is invisible to the former.

The next night, the child was standing on the sidewalk again. Waiting. She held a slip of paper.

“I have the tracking number,” she said.

This time, the deliveryman was ready for her. He made a show of inspecting the paper.

“Well, now,” he said. “This tracking number changes everything.”

He disappeared into his truck. Then he emerged bearing two enormous boxes. One of them was extremely large, and heavy.

“It’s here!” she cried out, leaping a whole 10 feet into the air.

He carried the boxes to her apartment and placed them in her living room. The child’s mother wasn’t home. And the little girl was much too young, and far too ecstatic, to notice there were no delivery labels on these boxes.

The next evening, the girl was at the curb again, waiting for him.

“They sent a REAL tree!” she cried. “It’s not a blow-up tree, it’s a REAL living tree! With a stand! And they sent ornaments, too! So many ornaments! And tinsel! And everything! And there’s a card from Santa! In his own writing! And it’s so amazing!”

And what happened then? Well, in Whoville they say, that John’s small heart, grew three sizes that day.

The end.