Why real letters still matter in a digital world
Oh my stars the postal strike is over. Honestly, what a pain. I immediately sent out the October Cottage Letter so if you’re wondering, it’s on the way. If you’re wondering what the letters are all about, get one here at my Etsy shop.
It is hard to believe I started sending letters back in 2012.
Thirteen years ago I was wonder if anyone would care to receive a letter from Paris. Holy smokes, that turned out rather well. Thousands upon thousands of letters. The post office staff would groan when they saw me coming to ask for stamps in bulk. That always meant they had to go to the back and take them out of the vault. I’m not sure how far this vault was but they made it seem like it was in the catacombs. Anyway…
When I started mailing letters from Paris, I never imagined it would spark a wave of letter subscriptions.
I didn’t plan to start a trend — I just wanted to send a few painted letters from Paris, to report on the pretty life, and to make some walking around cash. But those early Paris Letters became the very first letter subscription on Etsy… There wasn’t even a category for them back then.
Ah this was one of those prize autumn photos in Paris. Good times.
And the story continues from my cottage. This month I talk about the garden, or more specifically, the slow fall into chaos. This sentence alludes to the topic:
Weeds are the pajama pants of the garden. Comfort wins over style.
Pajama, pyjama, po-tay-to, po-tah-to... Let’s call the whole thing off, which is how I felt about pulling out weeds near the end of the season. Even with the postal strike and time on my hands, I didn’t seem to find time to deal with the weeds. I’m hoping a solid frost takes care of it.
While I was twiddling my thumbs, I was trying to make videos on Instagram. That begat the algorithm to share with me just how many other letter subscriptions there were out there. And that begat a lot of feelings. Not all great. Sometimes I wonder how these young ingénues with their excellent pants and video editing skills do it. I mean they push out a lot of videos. They have thousands of thousands of followers and piles and piles of envelopes in their videos. How???
However, they have the sweet momentum of youth.
I, too, was one of them 14 years ago. Let’s see how they are doing 14 years from now. One cannot compare. They offer gold encrusted stickers. I offer longevity. I also have you, sweet reader, who has been with me since the beginning.
I subscribed to a few of these letter subscriptions and I laughed at the small print. I mean, they jam as much as they can into one piece of paper. One does feel old at having to pull out the new and improved reading glasses to read a letter.
Also made me glad to have my large 14 pt font.
Also in reading articles about the Canada Post strike, I learned about how many people never receive letters or anything fun in the mail. Weeks go by before they even check their mailboxes. They don’t even know the fun they are missing.
Then I spotted this on Instagram:
Thank you US Postal Service for restoring my faith in the letter. Yes, a handwritten letter is a word hug.
There’s something quietly miraculous about holding a real letter.
It carries the weight of a journey — paper that has been used to tell a story. It has been touched, folded, sealed, and stamped. It traveled from my hand to hands at my post office, all through boxes and sorting machines, to other hands in other post offices in other countries, through all kinds of weather and moods just to reach you. It arrives in a mailbox with a kind of presence you can’t get from a text or email or feed.
A letter asks you to pause, to sit down, and to take a moment. It’s proof that someone, somewhere, thought of you long enough to write.
And at the end of a long day of screens, you lay your head down in bed and think about the day. None of those other things come to mind… but that letter. Oh yes. That letter arrived. And wasn’t it nice to get something fun in the mail.
-Janice
PS The latest over on Instagram…
