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I started writing love letters to friends in June 2008, prompted by having lunch with a friend who was in the doldrums. I wrote a blog post about it called A Love Letter to a Friend
That initial letter renewed my personal practice of writing letters and started me on a journey to write several others to my siblings and friends telling them what I appreciated and loved about them. Letter writing, especially penned by hand and sent via postal mail, is a lost-art these days or so the dire statistics from various articles in the media would have one believe. My own experience of those 15-odd letters I penned was that it was better to give because most of the recipients didn’t feel so inspired to send a letter to me…whatever…that wasn’t why I sent them.
Milton J. Valencia penned a letter about the lost art of letter writing in a recent article in the Boston Sunday Globe called “Last Lines.”
Another article in that issue also talked about the fact that penmanship, especially cursive writing, is getting very little attention in most schools today, getting taught briefly in third grade if at all. I’ve had people (adults and adolescents) tell me that writing makes their hands hurt. This always makes me think of lessons in printing and cursive writing in chalk at chalkboards (remember those?) and in the specially-lined paper used to practice writing in elementary school.
I have always liked writing and receiving letters, postcards and greeting cards. I send thank-you letters out religiously, most often penned by my own hand. Need a reference letter? I’m your woman and can turn one around in mere hours. Although I communicate daily via email, it does not replace hand-written letters, with which I take more care. I email things I would never take the time to hand-write (like jokes for example) but I also pen things I would not email.
The December holidays will find me sending out more than 125 greeting cards. I will use surplus cards from previous years and have begun buying new ones at various stationery stores, Marshall’s/TJ Maxx, and drugstores. Because I send out so many cards, I get lots back. I sit them on top of the entertainment center in my living room and tape them on the glass-paned door to the hall-way. Looking at them makes me feel surrounded by the love and well-wishes of all the people who’ve sent them to me. It is a thoughtful and not inexpensive act, these days, to send a personal greeting.
I also display birthday greetings and those from other holidays. It just makes me feel good to be surrounded by these tactile expressions love of family and friends. Electronic greeting cards give me that feeling for a moment but then they’re gone – either deleted or saved where they might be opened again and again but rarely are.
I used to keep all the cards I received but now I recycle all but the most personal. I send the card-fronts to a charity that uses them and put the backs in the recycle bin.
Blogger Carla asks readers to “Write, Mail, Connect.” She has undertaken an ambitious project – to write a letter everyday in 2009. She began on January 1. “My friends and family, and my connections to them, are the reasons for this project and this blog.”
Another blogger, Wendy, has a passion for letter writing
I especially enjoyed a recent post she did on “legacy letters.” She writes:
“Today I ran across a web site that talks about legacy letters or ethical wills. These are documents you can write to pass on your values to your children or grandchildren as a legacy to them, just like you might pass on your grandmother’s tea set or whatever.”
She recommends the site, Life Legacies. It was founded by Rachael Freed, founder of Women’s Legacies™. Ms. Freed that encourages the writing of spiritual-ethical wills as a way to communicate one’s legacy. She has a book, Women’s Legacies, Women’s Lives that is available through this website.
PR guru, author and activist, Terrie Williams, in her first book, The Personal Touch wrote about her practice of keeping a box of stationery at her desk so that if she heard someone had a birthday, was ill, or had good news, she had the tools in
