It wasn’t until Christmas and the arrival of Christmas cards in the post that I realised just how few handwritten envelopes arrived through the door on an average week. None in fact.
Barring birthdays and cheery notes from neighbours about saved parcels it’s a rare day indeed that brings a handwritten letter to my doorstep.
The thought of that made me a little sad, even a little nostalgic. There is something delightfully magical in a handwritten envelope. Something that marks it apart from it’s more formal buff-coloured cousins.
It’s an everyday item but elevated to magical status by virtue of the fact that someone was thinking of you. Thinking of you in their choice of card/paper/envelope. Thinking of you as they wrote their words. Thinking of you as they carefully wrote your address on the front - being careful to make it clear enough for the hard-working postie to read it clearly.
That’s a lot of thought, a lot of intention, a lot of positivity that no amount of email communication can hope to emulate.
Penpals!
And so I got to thinking - wouldn’t it be nice to have a penpal. Not a regular penpal maybe but someone who you might swap a letter or two with.
I don’t know about you but the word penpal always makes me think of the slightly tortured letters we had to send to equally awkward German pupils at school. Painstakingly trying to translate the minutiae of our lives into stilted sentences. “Ich habe eine Schwester und zwei Katzen”
I didn’t have cats but I wanted to make myself more interesting and our German teacher didn’t seem to mind the odd embellishment as long as it was grammatically correct.
How it will work.
This is something that I’d like to offer within my paid Everyday Knitter community here, just fill out the simple Google form below and I’ll pair you up with a like-minded person either in your home country or elsewhere in the world.
We will then assign a time period for letters to be exchanged between the two of you bearing in mind the fact that international shipping can take a few weeks. To keep costs down and to keep things simple there is absolutely no expectation of you including anything other than a letter. Your words and intentions are a gift enough without feeling the need to add anything else.
We will have a chat thread within Substack where we can share the letters we received and chat about the process. Maybe it might even be something we repeat seasonally? Who knows, but I’d like to give it a try and see where it takes us. What do you think?
If you aren’t currently a member of my paid community here you are more than welcome to join us, you can even have a 7 day free trial to try it out if you aren’t sure. Or if you have any questions please just hit reply to this email.
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