Santa appeared to be coming late this season after a Christmas shopping bonanza nearly collapsed the mail service from the United States to Costa Rica.

Courier services said they were caught off guard by the binge of holiday shopping that came this month, which they said was a positive consumer response to the buzz they started about “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving when sales kick off the Christmas shopping rush in the United States.

The couriers promoted online shopping for residents here to take part in the U.S. sales –that's when the bottleneck emerged.

“Internet shopping was huge this year in Costa Rica,” said Jeff Duchesneau, general manager of Aerocasillas. He said this month Costa Rica's holiday-time online purchases from stores in the United States have doubled the amount of last December, attributing the growth partly to low prices and also to what he believes is a trend that's catching on.

An estimated 100,000 people in Costa Rica use courier services such as Aerocasillas, as well as Interlink Express, Jetbox, Speedobox and a host of others. They provide the logistics, from setting customers up with a Miami, Florida mailing address to sending the parcels and delivering them to a Costa Rican address.

But the logistical operation hit a snag, said Duchesneau. Planes have been hard to come by as Costa Rican exports continue to slump, in a recession that has made it less desirable for air carriers to fly full of cargo to Costa Rica and then nearly empty on the U.S. return flight, he said.

“The middle two weeks of December were just brutal. The real bottleneck came from the airline shipping to Costa Rica,” the Aerocasillas manager said.

Duchesneau said his customers were not happy, and just as fast as they clicked through their online purchases they've been filling his inbox and sending Tweets on the online social network Twitter to voice their frustrations with the delays.

“Things are finally starting to flow again,” he said Tuesday.

But for some Costa Rican and expat families here, it remains to be seen if Santa makes it in time.