HANOVER COUNTY, Va. — While managing her farm stand in Mechanicsville, Katie Brackman unexpectedly became a holiday hero after discovering a stack of misplaced packages.
While Brackman was taking her kids to school on Thursday morning, she noticed a "bunch of packages" stacked in the farm stand that were not addressed to her or match any of the mailboxes outside.
"I mean there was a package from Anthropologie and I was like, 'I mean that could be for me.' But it wasn't," Brackman said. "They were all for residents who lived down the road from here."
Brackman has a theory about how the seven parcels ended up at the farm stand.
"I'm guessing somebody was delivering and got tired of delivering at night and just decided to dump them," Brackman said. "I don't know if they planned to come back in the morning and pick them."
One of the owners of the packages received a delivery notification with a photo of the package in the farm stand, leading to confusion.
"I did have one of the people who was missing a package say that they had gotten a delivery notification with a photo of the package in the farm stand — and they were very confused because you know that's not their property," Brackman explained.
So she paused farm stand operations for a moment of seasonal goodwill.
"And just figured I'd be a Santa's elf for a moment and help out," she said.
Brackman shared the news across social media, adding the names of the package recipients and their street addresses, inviting anyone who recognized the names to claim their packages.
"Facebook came through and people were tagging people that they knew," Brackman said. "I wrote their name and the street they lived on and was like, 'Hey, if you are this person or know this person and are missing a package, I've got it. It's safe.'"
Brackman said the packages were picked up by their owners in "a day, honestly."
She admitted she was a bit flummoxed by some people's reactions to her good deed.
"I was surprised at how many people were surprised that I was doing the right thing by the packages," Brackman said. "I guess this day and age people just anticipate bad intentions... But it's somebody's hard-earned money, it's somebody's Christmas gift. I wanted to make sure that things went to their rightful owners."
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