I was walking to the bank and passed a spot where a mailbox used to be, and it got me thinking; I could not remember the last time I actually wrote a letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and mailed it. I can communicate more easily via email or WhatsApp. We haven’t mailed a payment in years. We didn’t even mail invitations to my daughter’s wedding.
So when was the last time you actually wrote a letter and did all the other stuff?
One caveat: letters for work, or to your Senator, or to the electric company or the phone company, etc., don’t count. I mean real, honest to goodness personal letters.
It’s a little sad that my kids, all now in their 20s, grew up with email and IM, and never really knew the thrill of getting a letter from a far-off friend.
I can tell you, with certainty, that I was writing letters to my college girlfriend while we were living in different cities during the summer, and that would have been 1987.
After that? I wouldn’t be surprised if I wrote a letter or two somewhere in the late '80s or '90s, but I can’t remember it (I didn’t have email until 1994, and it wasn’t until a few years after then that most people I knew had email). I’m certain, however, that it’s been more than a decade, at least, since I last wrote a letter.
Sometime in the fall of 2007… I found a friend of mine who I’d lost touch with via one of those person-finder websites, and since I didn’t have anything but an address and names, I wrote a letter to that address, hoping it was him.
It was- I got a phone call not long afterward, and I’ve kept up ever since.
If postcards count, then last week from my trip to Washington. If they don’t, then three months ago, when I sent a gift to my grandmother and enclosed a letter.
I send postcards to my family and some random subset of my friends pretty much every time I go on a longer holiday or business trip, which is at least a couple times a year. Real letters written from home I don’t send as often; maybe one or two per year to certain family members. Unfortunately, postage rates for me doubled with my last move: the German post office charges 90 cents for an international letter, but the Austrian post office charges 180 cents!
I can’t begin to imagine when the last time was. Certainly not for decades. Unless you count Mother’s Day cards, Father’s Day cards, and Christmas cards. I still send those every year.
An actual letter? Probably to my sister a little over a year ago; she doesn’t use email or texting, so normally if I have any message to convey to her I do it through a text or IM to my niece (“Tell your Mom I said Happy Bday & am sending her a present,” for example). But this concerned my recent fibroid surgery and her ovarian cyst which involved a lot of personal, detailed medical information–and why subject my niece to that?
Postcards. I just sent a handful from Scotland, but they seem to take forever to arrive these days. I’ve been home for over a month now and a friend just let me know she received one I mailed from Shetland at the end of May.
Postcards: I send a few from Barbados every winter. I sent a letter to my thesis advisor in the fall of 1999 and got the answer from his wife that he had died in early 2000 and wrote her a letter of condolence. I got a letter from the wife of a Swiss friend that he had died in 2013 and wrote her a letter of condolence. Since 2013? Not any memory I can dredge up. My sister does not use email but I talk to her occasionally. No letters.
I mail handwritten thank you cards to relatives who send me stuff for my birthday or Chanukah every year.
An actual letter? 3 years ago when I had a friend in Navy boot camp. Snail mail was the only method of contact for the first month or two. I had to go out and buy stamps, envelopes, and writing paper. The letters she sent me were all 3-4 pages long, so I tried to reciprocate and write as much as possible. It definitely felt archaic, but it was kind of fun at the same time–98% of stuff I get in the mail are things I don’t want, so getting actual letters was nice.
About a month ago. But I send other things than letters using US mail, and it has been something of a hardship on those occasions since our local mailbox disappeared. I understand the reason for it, but now I have to drive somewhere to mail a letter.
I have participated three times in the SDMB postcard exchange in the last 5 years or so and so wrote a lot of cards (it’s a lot of fun, I can only recommend it). I also send two or three cards from every holiday to special friends. Then I have a tradition to send a CD album every year for my dear doper friend The Butterfly’s Ghost’s birthday, and as a music geek, I always have to include “hearing instructions” (yes, I’m terrible) which I add as handwritten letters :).
It seems I’m the odd man out. Personal USPS correspondence is my preferred method of communication to most of the people I know and want to stay in touch with. I wrote a short note to a friend up in Oregon a week or so ago, just to say hello and remind her to put me into her will. (No kidding.)
E-mail is great, but as others have mentioned above, getting a personal snail-mail post is usually a pleasant, if trivial, event for most people. It is for me, so I make it a point to make it so for others.
But I also enjoy writing. So a postal missive for me is a way to fulfill a personal enjoyment and, incidentally, make someone happy on the other end. And I don’t need a publisher nor an agent.
In the interest of full disclosure, I write to someone maybe twice per month. And while hardly prolific, the recipients will typically get two to three single spaced pages of the goings-on in my life. No one has ever complained about getting one of my posts.
I tried to become penpals with a kid I went to camp with in high school. I think we got 2 letters in before getting bored. That was '98 or so. My wife handled all of the thank you cards and stuff for our wedding and I really wasn’t involved.
I hate hand writing things it hurts my hand and my penmanship has always been illegible. It takes me forever to even write quite notes to to my wife that are readable.