Most people like receiving mail. Not bills or credit card offers or sale ads, but the kind of mail that means something. Birthday cards. Christmas cards. Just thinking of you cards. A brief note saying hello. An announcement of good news. The old-fashioned sort of letter catching a friend up on one’s life.

Most people like receiving that sort of mail, but most people don’t seem to want to take the time to write it, and that’s the problem. It’s not that we want less snail mail in our lives, it’s that no one believes they have the time to send it.

This last month I’ve been on a bit of a mailing binge. I’ve sent out 15 postcards and 4 letters. It would have been more if my postcards had registered faster or I’d received more replies. I suspect September’s numbers on those fronts will grow now that it seems I may have some new pen pals as well.

The postcards were sent through postcrossing, writing to people in the USA, Russia, Germany, Thailand, and more. The fun with postcrossing is that you never know where your next postcard is coming from. You could hear from anyone, anywhere in the world, tomorrow.

A postcard sent to me from England last year resulted in a pen pal. Neither of us were looking for anyone to keep a correspondence with and yet by pure chance my address was given to him, my gut feeling was to write back (something I never do with postcrossing), and a year later we’ve stayed in touch. If it were not for snail mail, we’d never know each other. Our entire friendship exists on the pages of our letters. We like it best that way.

I challenge you to send snail mail this fall. Whether that means sending out Halloween cards, or writing thank you notes around Thanksgiving, or writing a bit more than ‘Happy Holidays!’ when you send our your Christmas cards. Whether that means you write a long letter to a family member or send a short note card to a friend you haven’t spoken to in awhile. Whatever it is, write something, address it, stick a stamp on it, and let it go out into the world. It’s worth the effort.

*Image taken from Morguefile, creative commons license, user veggiegretz.