{ Letter Writing... }

I remember a time when I would get immense pleasure from buying pretty stationery paper on which to write letters to my family.

It was exciting and it was thrilling, I would sit down with the paper and a cup of tea and would just write about my day, about my thoughts and dreams and amongst all this I would have a plethora of questions to my recipient, things I wanted to know, things that I eagerly awaited the answer to in the letter that I was bound to receive in reply.

It was such a pleasure to check the mail box and see a handwritten letter, knowing that the person took the time to sit down, to put pen to paper and to express their thoughts, not just hit a send button, or type a quite sentence through Twitter or Facebook.

It feels to me that through the expansion of technology, we've lost a lot of the personal things that were part of our lives.

Everything is becoming inpersonal, what once was considered an art has now been named "snail mail".

Postcards are no longer exchanged, do you remember when you went on vacation somewhere, the first thing you would do was send a postcard back to the family?

It was a brief glimpse of what you were enjoying, but nowadays, people touch bases through cellphone or text message, even photos are sent through phones or downloaded to computers and emailed to a bunch of people within 5 minutes of reaching your destination.

I often wonder what it will be like when my children are adults? They will never have a stack of letters tied in a ribbon, will never get to sit and read the beautiful handwriting of a grandmother or grea tgrandmother.

I still have letters from some of my husband's first deployments, it was my words on a piece of paper that kept him going, that gave him the strength to get through the separation, but even now with access to email and computers, those are few and far between, it's easier to just punch a bunch of letters on the keyboard of my laptop than take the time to sit down and pass my thoughts through a pen and to paper.

I long to hold on to this feeling just a little longer, to once again open my mail box to find handwritten postcards from all over the country and the world.

So I've decided to hold a Postcard Exchange and I'm hoping you will want to join in. I've seen a few blogs doing the same and thought it would be a lot of fun.

It's very simple. I would love to receive a post card from all 50 States and from around the world and in turn will send out a postcard of my own to those that send me one of theirs. Are you interested?

Even if you're in my State or think that someone already sent me one from your State, I would still like to receive one from you. If you don't have a blog but would still like to join in, just leave me a comment with your email address.

All addresses will be exchanged through email and will not be forwarded to anyone.

As an incentive to participate, once I've collected a postcard from every State, I will hold a giveaway for those that sent them in for a chance to win an Arizona Themed box of goodies, the contents will be a surprise of course.

Please add your name to McKlinky underneath if you want to join in, you can also add the name of your State or Country.




If you do participate in this exchange, won't you take my little button and display it on your blog for all to see? I'm hoping that this will encourage others to make the same or a similar initiative on their blogs, who knows, we may just restart the Letter Writing and Postcard sending craze again.

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