It’s been an interesting year for the U.S. mail in Truckee.

Local post offices were stricken with an influenza of under-employment. Then, winter made delivery even more difficult by burying postmaster-general-approved mail receptacles under feet of frozen precipitation.

What snow didn’t crush, plows did. Christmas cards never delivered their wishes; the casualties were many.

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Lessons learned, here are a few options to prepare for next winter’s blitzkrieg on mail delivery.

Return to Center Mailboxes

With a pun that golden, these have to be good. This company makes a swiveling mailbox that literally rolls with winter’s punches, and makes a savvy deterrent against neighborhood mailbox baseball teams. You can order these bad boys at returntocentermailbox.com.

Office Boss

Get a P.O. box at the local post office or a private mailbox (PMB) at a mail center such as The Office Boss. Next year, point and laugh at your neighbors as they chisel mail delivery cul-de-sacs from snowbanks. Granted, you’ll risk your Subaru on slick roads in “plow dodge” matches with chainless tourists to get your mail. At least you won’t have to install a swinging mailbox come spring.

Move to Tahoe Donner

It takes a regimen of Diamox just to live up there, but the good news is not having to worry about saying goodbye to your mailbox in November.

Residents here rely on a number of mail delivery stations positioned around the neighborhood, each just big enough for a mail-truck to navigate, and not-at-all convenient for an electric car with gull-wing doors.

Each location is regularly plowed by hardworking locals super-psyched to miss a powder day so second-home owners can collect restrictive covenants updates twice a winter.

Do-It-Yourself

Not into moving? Truckee’s own community makerspace, the Roundhouse, is an ideal way to handcraft a winter-resistant mailbox.

The nonprofit’s metal shop has something called a “plasma cutter.” I don’t know exactly what it does, but I bet it cuts metal with plasma, which is basically blood from the sun.

There’s a BOMAR bandsaw, Miller Multimatic 215 Multi Process Welder, 22-inch industrial drill press, and various other heavy, metal-bending apparatuses.

The Roundhouse has instructors and courses to help you Iron Man your mailbox to 100 percent protection against the cold evil of next year’s atmospheric rivers.

Whether you relocate, weld, or shop, consider yourself ready to look winter straight in the eye next year and declare, “I’ve got mail!”

But you have to shovel the berm first.