The only way to make sure it gets there by Christmas nowadays is an expedited service. Around Christmas in the past 7 years Ive been in the states I've seen packages take 7-10 days on average and sometimes up to a month to get there. Personally, I would suggest using something else than DHL. DHL complains in Romania about serving only major cities and may in many cases require the person to travel to the main city of the county. I have relatives in Suceava county and the main city in that county is of course, Suceava. Other services such as UPS or Fedex charge you a $20-$25 extended area delivery fee and deliver to the person's front door most of the times. Go to either www.ups.com or www.fedex.com and figure out the weight of your package and how much it would cost to get it there. This route if a very large package, will be horribly expensive, from my location a 1lb package to Romania is about $80. If you don't have anything very valuable or if the package can wait to be delivered untill after Christmas go with USPS global express mail or priority mail global. Those charge you about 20/10$ for the first pound respectively. mail sent via USPS however will get held at Suceava post office(most times) and the receiver of the package will have to come there to pick the package up. This mail will be, normally, opened and inspected and the person may be asked to pay various fees on it as well as, on a case by case basis, some items may "misteriously dissapear" from packages sent this way. In the end the choice is yours. As far as for customs USPS is the best reference to use on what you can or cannot ship there. General reference is you can't ship cash or equivalent, explosives or illegal substances or illegal merchandise. You cannot ship jewelery and you need special permits for some foods and plants.