On the radio this morning, I heard an author bemoaning the end of letter writing. IHHO, this is the end of an era (that’s lasted for millenia) and signifies a tragic loss of history for us all. He may have been overly dramatic but it got me to thinking, I cannot remember the last letter that I wrote.
What about you? Email obviously doesn’t count and I’d like to exclude postcards and greeting cards as well. When was the last time that you put pen to paper, stuck the letter in an envelope and put it in the mailbox?
Last time was when my mother-in-law’s mom died around a year ago (might have been a bit longer but close enough to 1). Email didn’t seem like it would cut it.
Why should email be excluded? It certainly seems to be essentially epistolary in form. Sure it doesn’t involve a pen or paper, but if that’s our standard, we shouldn’t talk about the milennia-old existence of letter-writing considering that we no longer use cunieform or styli or papyrus.
Some might say that email is more impermanent. But if had to hazard a guess, I think that my gmails about my weekend plans are going to exist in retrieveable form for a much longer time than my letter to the city contesting my parking ticket earlier this week.
I write letters to a few old friends every Christmas, so 5 months ago. (Not those photocopied “Christmas letters” – these are handwritten, I’ll have you know.)
I clicked ‘more than five years ago’ because I’m sure you mean personal letters. I’ve written plenty of business letters in the last few years. The last personal letter was in 1996, when I was living abroad and didn’t have much access to phones and not many people I knew had email.
I don’t know. Email just seems more impersonal IMHO.
I guess this thread is just about nostalgia. If I asked “When was the last time that you listened to a record?”, I assume that wouldn’t ask why CD’s were excluded.
I vaugely remember writing a letter to a roommate I had at track camp back in '98 before either of us had emails, he wrote me first. I did it once hated it and haven’t wanted to write out a letter since.
In my capacity as the Secretary on the board of a non-profit, I would hand-write thank-you notes for certain donations. Most often I just used a standard typed letter and would insert the donors information in a database that then inserted the necessary information into the correct slot.
We often had families who would ask that in lieu of flowers donations be made to our organization after a loved one died. In those cases, I **always ** hand wrote a letter to the family thanking them for thinking of us in their time of grief. I would also include a list of people who donated in memory of their loved one so that if they wanted to personally thank those people they could. Often I would also make a phone call to the family to let them know how much we appreciated their gift. Also if we received a large donation or something out of the ordinary, I would write a letter along with the enclosed form letter. Anytime a child donated $$ or a cub scout or girl scout group had a food drive, they got a hand written thank you.
One of my best friends just moved back home, a few hours away from me, and I wanted to send her something to cheer her up. So this is what my letter said:
Hey!
I miss you.
-Meagan.
And about a fourth of cup of heart sprinkles thrown in
I write a couple of letters a month, to pretty much anyone who will give me their address. I even make my own letterhead. But, to be honest, my handwriting is terrible so I generally type them up on one manual typewriter or another. People don’t seem to mind - several times, friends have mentioned enjoying the way the old typewriter “embossed” the page.
I’d say one in 5 letters sent out gets a snail mail response, which is the best part.
I pretty much stopped all letter writing around 2003. In fact, December 2003 is the last letter I remember sitting down to write. I do believe I’ve written postcards since then, but an actual honest-to-goodness letter? Not since then. And, at that time even, it was pretty rare for anyone to write letters.
I used to be a pretty regular letter writer, but even by the late 90s, that form of communication was rapidly becoming extinct.
My grandparents lent me some money, and I paid them back every month for about 3 years. I wrote a 2-or-3-page typed letter about what was up with me and stuff (I typed it because - surprise! - my handwriting stinks, and they are old).
They enjoyed the letters so much that I wrote them a few more in the next year or so, until last year. I might write to them again, I don’t know.
I do see my grandparents about 10 times a year, they only live an hour and a half away. But they so love getting letters, it’s the least I can do.
I put other because there was no option for “I’ve never written a letter”. I’m 33.
Sure, I’ve written long, personal, emails–and a few times typed something up and mailed it–but I’ve never hand-written a personal note to someone. In fact, I haven’t hand-written anything more than a sentence or two long since I was in college. And even then, only under duress (like exams with essay portions). I haven’t handwritten anything by personal volition since grade school.
My nieces like getting hand-written letters and are into word searches, so I write letters to them and throw in a hand-written word search. If it weren’t for them, we’re talking late 80’s.
For my wife it would be thank-you cards for our wedding, ten years ago.
I exchange letters with a friend of mine. We both enjoy receiving mail that’s not junk mail or bills and it gives us both an excuse to buy silly stationary.
