- Aubrie Jones’s favorite part of being a seasonal UPS employee is delivering presents
- This year, the Delaware local came across an unwrapped Barbie Dream House in her pile of deliveries
- While packing the rest of her car with deliveries she had received from her brown truck driver lead, Jones started to wonder if there was anything she could do about the unwrapped box. Eventually, she decided to wrap it herself
- She filmed herself doing this and later posted the video to TikTok, where it quickly went viral, racking up 1.1 million views and more than 5,000 comments
Aubrie Jones’s favorite part of being a seasonal UPS employee is delivering presents. So when the Delaware local recently came across an unwrapped Barbie Dream House in her pile of deliveries, she found herself in a conundrum.
She recognized the address on the toy, and realized there wouldn’t be a good place to hide the gift at that particular home.
“I was really thinking about it a lot,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I don’t know the homeowners personally, but I love surprises, I love giving gifts, and the thought of this surprise being ruined for someone was really bothering me.”
“I just kept imagining if this was my own family — if my sister ordered this, and this box was sitting on her step, and my niece were to walk right outside and see it, before Christmas Day,” she adds. “When you think about how something can affect your own family, if the shoe were on the other foot, you really get into a different mindset.”
While packing the rest of her car with deliveries she had received from her brown truck driver lead, Jones started to wonder if there was anything she could do. Eventually, before heading out on her rounds, she went into her house to use the bathroom. When she walked out through the garage, she spotted a roll of wrapping paper — and that’s when it hit her.
Jones grabbed the paper roll, a pair of scissors and some painter’s tape, and started wrapping the Barbie Dream House. She filmed herself doing this and later posted the video to TikTok, where it quickly went viral, racking up 1.1 million views and more than 5,000 comments.
“I initially filmed it to show my sister because my niece loves Barbies, and I wanted to show her how the Barbie house was shipped,” she says. But people had lots of warm, fuzzy feelings.
“This is what our parents meant when they said Santa is real. The spirit of Christmas. That’s the magic,” one user commented.
“Definition of Santa’s Helper,” UPS chimed in.
“ours leaves notes on our door every year ‘I put the package in your shed so the little one wouldn’t see it,’ ” another person wrote.
Reading through the comments, Jones says they were overwhelmingly genuine and kind, but several people left detailed comments on how their children had seen a big Christmas gift in the past because of poor packaging, which spoiled the surprise.
“So many comments were thanking me for doing this, saying I was doing the Lord’s work or I was saving Christmas, that I deserved a raise or a bonus, or that the video made them smile and believe in humanity again,” she adds. “It was honestly a great feeling reading through all of the positive comments. It really felt like a sense of community.”
However, Jones adds that she received some negative comments from people questioning how she knew the package was a gift. She says it’s often difficult to tell which packages are gifts and which aren’t, but she’s learned to make educated guesses based on clues like signs of children living in a house or Christmas decorations around a neighborhood.
“But the way I see it, even if it isn’t a gift, the worst thing I did is prevent a porch pirate from being enticed to steal a gift, and I am happy to do that,” she continues.
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Since posting on TikTok, Jones shares how she’s wrapped even more boxes. Just a few days ago, she came across a a computer monitor that was displayed all over the box, so she wrapped one side as well, just in case.
“I hope people are inspired to do something for someone else, without needing something in return,” she says.
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