With the holiday season ramping up, the U.S. Postal Service’s New Jersey Distribution Center is already seeing the annual surge of mail, and workers say they’re prepared for one of the busiest times of the year.

The facility is among the busiest in the country, serving central and northern New Jersey and New York City.

“We definitely see an uptick in our packages, and our mail. Many people are writing letters to loved ones, sending packages, ordering things online for themselves,” said Xavier Hernandez, with the Postal Service.

Inside the massive warehouse, rows of conveyor belts and sorting machines move packages through a tightly coordinated system: separating, scanning, routing and sending them off to customers’ doorsteps.

“We are moving about a million packages today, all together, and once we are up and running with our newest machines, we’ll have one single machine that can move up to 1.5 million packages a day by itself,” Hernandez said.

That new machine, known as the Matrix Regional Sorter, or MARS, is about halfway operational right now. While a standard belt processes roughly 10,000 packages an hour, the MARS can handle about 40,000 an hour at each of the 12 MARS arms. Hernandez says construction has been underway for roughly a year, and the machine will be fully operational by February.

The Postal Service is also reminding customers about key holiday mailing deadlines. To ensure your packages arrive by Christmas, Dec. 17 is the cutoff for Ground Advantage, Dec. 18 for Priority Mail, and Dec. 20 for Priority Mail Express.