So I got a chain letter in the mail the other day. Well, let me re-phrase that — Mo got a chain letter in the mall. Actually, it a pre-printed letter from a friend, inviting her to join a sticker club. All Mo (or more appropriately, all I had to do) was copy the letter 12 times, send one blank one and one completed one to six friends within six days, yadda, yadda, yadda and you’ll get some stickers in the mail. Gee, thanks. And as much as I didn’t want to do copy, address enevelopes and all the rest, I did it for a couple of reasons:

1) Who doesn’t like getting mail, especially something that isn’t a bill or a solicitation?
2) It seemed like a good post-nap, pre-dinner time filler for us, and when I labeled it an “art project”, well shoot, it was like Mo hit the jackpot!
3) Once upon a time, all written correspondence I had with people was through letters, or more acurrately, through letter writing.

And so, not only did I copy the letters, let Mo do them up with stickers and pen and crayon drawings, I included a short personalized note to the moms of the children that live far away from us. No missives, mind you, I just kept it short and sweet. Still, in that one page scrawl, I hoped to convey that even though I sent them this chain letter, they and their family were important to me.

You see, I love to write. I love a good, quality stationery, preferrable mongrammed (yes, I’m a little snooty – or is it snotty?). I even went as far as to make my own occasion cards. As a teenager and into my adult years, I wrote in a journal almost every day. I have a huge plastic tub full of my old journals that I may or may not let the girls read when they get older — maybe we’ll have our own version of The Notebook. But what I wrote most of all were letters — I had pen pals in Australia and in London. We took letter writing classes in school and learned the proper way to express greetings. I even did the regular ol’ chain letter — copying some epistle ten times by hand. Notice it was 10 times — yeah, this was back when I walked to school, 5 miles, in the snow, uphill, both ways and I had no shoes! I wrote letters to the boys that I “dated” who lived in other states (yea, my dad was a big supporter of that). Back when stamps cost 0.29 cents, I could burn through a book of stamps in about 10 days. Really, I was that proflific. And also because, when you wrote to people, they wrote back.

I had 11 page, college ruled, double sided letters on whose margins I doodled before stuffing it into a #10 sized envelope and running it to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. My mom would inevitably ask me what on earth I had to talk about for 10 plus pages, certain that I just wrote “I miss you, I love you,” over and over again to some broken down boy. Honestly, I’m sure that was in there, but it was probably a typical teen angst filled, play-by-play account of my day and the injustices perpetrated against me as a result of not being able to hang out with him/my friends/at the movies/after my part-time job/yadda,yadda,yadda.

During my college years, prior to the full on embrace of email, prior to the advent of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and all these other social networking megasites, people either used the phone, actually got up and looked for someone, or wrote letters. DH and I were “a-courtin'” around this time and we would write eachothter letter with a fervent regularity even though we still spent time together after class or on the week-ends. What a cap to my day when after dinner with DH and friends at the UC, I check my mail for the first time in a few days and there’s a letter from DH. Even now, I get a thrill when I see an evelope addressed to me — by hand! Or when their return address is handwritten, too! Homemade Christmas cards! Woo-hoo! Thank you notes (ohhh, I do love a thank you note)! Even better, the I was just thinking about you type of note, which has sadly been stripped down to a hastily thumbed text sent in-between stoplights on the way to pick up Taylor/Tyler/Madison/Ellie et. al from football/basketball/soccer/ballet/swimming. There’s a lot to be said about that.

This sticker club exercise had me doing several things that I often complain I don’t have time to do — spending time with my girls, catching up with my friends, having a chance to write for pleasure. And oh yeah, we’re going to get some stickers in the mail, too!