I used to love writing letters, and one gift I always enjoyed receiving was a gift set, containing paper and envelopes. There just weren’t office supplies shops back then where you could buy paper and envelopes.
Kids would have pen pals all over the world and look forward to sending and receiving letters from exotic places with weird foreign postage stamps on them. At Christmas we always had to write a “thank you” note to anyone who had given a gift, and this involved hours of tortured writing before the paper was finally placed in the envelope and the nasty-tasting glue got licked.
Email is a wonderful thing, but most of these emails are unnecessary and tell us nothing we want to know. In the past letters were written with care, on sweet-smelling hand wove paper and drawn with anticipation from a matching envelope. When my father died he left behind a kit bag full of the letters my mother and he had exchanged during World War II, and I would sneak in and read some of them when my mother wasn’t around. British Army issue paper and envelopes that turned brown quickly but still carried my father’s distinctive writing, each word thoughtfully planned and carefully penned.
I suppose the wonderful thing about email and Facebook is that I can have many pen pals all over the world, and we can communicate rapidly and send photos easily, but nothing will ever replace a handwritten paper letter in a fancy envelope.
Tags: envelopes, office supplies
Pete • 
10:04 pm • 
