Last year, Hallee Sorenson celebrated her birthday alone. This year, she's received 10,000 birthday cards from people all over the world.
Hallee's international fame began with a simple Facebook post. Last week, her cousin Rebecca posted a photo of Hallee, who is autistic, sitting alone at her 18th birthday party.
"She had been so excited to have a party with her friends," Rebecca wrote. "Hallee sat at her party anxiously waiting for her friends to arrive so they could have fun...but Hallee's friends would never arrive. Not a single one. My cousin is a beautiful young woman who will always have the mind of a child...so as you can imagine, she was heartbroken."
Rebecca then made a request for her cousin's upcoming 19th birthday on July 2: "I would love to flood her mailbox with birthday cards, from all over!" she wrote. "This would be the best birthday gift she could ask for." She included Hallee's mailing address at the very end of the post.
It was quickly shared more than 200,000 times - and the birthday cards started to arrive at the Sorenson's Bangor, Maine, home almost immediately.
Hallee's family now moderates a Facebook page called Hallee's 19th Birthday, where they share photos of the roughly 10,000 cards Hallee has already received. On Monday, the post office delivered a massive crop of letters using two FedEx trucks, one UPS truck, and two postal service trucks, the Bangor Daily News reported. The city's postmaster himself was there to assist with the delivery.
The cards have come from people close to home in Maine:
And they've come from well-wishers as far as away as England:
There are even adorably misspelled cards from kids:
Hallie's mother Allyson Seel-Sorenson told the Bangor Daily News that she's tried to shield her daughter from the overwhelming response - Hallee doesn't respond well to chaos and surprises. But she said her daughter loved seeing her photo in the newspaper during a trip to the grocery store.
"YOU ROCK SO HARD," Seel-Sorenson wrote in a post early this week. "My heart is fit to BURST."