Letters Today? Yes, please!

 In this digital era, you may find exchanging letters to be rare. Well, this fact might be true, since everyone’s going all and around with emails and instant text messages for a better communication experience. Though it may seem like a rather traditional habit, these days some people decided to relive the trend of pen-palling. You’ve probably heard of this term before, but what is pen-palling really?

Pen-palling is a term for an activity where you exchange letters to your pen pal. A pen pal themselves is a term used for the person you’re exchanging letters with. The pen-pals that we’re talking about here could be someone you barely knew. In the pen-palling community, it would be very common to have the majority of your pen pal coming from abroad. I mean, you’re already sending letters, why not try sending them to a different country?

At this point, you might ask, “Why should I?” Well, the answer to your “Why should I?” would hold a different variation. Maybe it’s because you like to keep some things old-fashioned. Or maybe you’d like to try out your mother’s old hobby. Maybe you’re curious about how to send letters and its system. As you can see and think of, everyone would have millions of their own personal reason on why to start. But, seeing from a pen-paller’s eyes, the common interest of a pen-paller is to make friends. Exchanging letters itself would mean that you’ll have to write something. Normally, people would introduce themselves in the first letters and then after getting to know each other, they’d start telling each other about their days, or maybe tell them their experience, or just anything fun to talk about.

Sometimes, some individuals would also decide to slip in some simple gifts, like local tea packs, pictures, or candies. Maybe scrunchies or stationeries too. For your international pen pal, it would be a great idea to slip in pressed or preserved local flowers and leaves. But gifts aren’t obligatory. Most people would slip in some extras to be friendly.

Intrigued? Don’t worry! We’ve got your back! Here’s a mini-manual on how to start pen-palling.

First of all, in an act of pen-palling, you’ll, of course, need a receiver for your letter. These days, it’d be hard to find available pen-pals in magazines but thanks to technology, we can now find ones easily! In this case, using the power of social media is fairly needed. You can use Instagram to find available pen-pals by browsing through the hashtag #penpalswanted and pick one. Try DM-ing the person first to see if they’re still open for new pen-pals. Usually, on the first contact, you’ll have to tell a little bit about yourself, and then you can discuss who should be sending the first letter. 

Second, when you find the one, you can start making your letter. You can start by re-introducing yourself and maybe add a little more information. As said before, it’s not a bad idea to slip in some gifts like stickers, stamps, or bookmarks in your letter. An extra note: don’t overshare on one letter so that you’ll still have things to talk to on your next.

Third, send the letter! For this one, you’ll have two choices of method to send the letter. It’s either using postal stamps or using the ones with a tracking system. For some people, they’d probably use the ones with tracking systems since it’s safer and trackable. But, using postal stamps isn’t such a terrible idea. You can get your stamps from the post office and send them from there. Sure, the delivery would take much longer and there are slight chances of the letter being lost or a little defective, but your pen pal would be able to accept a postal stamp from you and keep it as a mini souvenir.

As explained, pen-palling is probably one good idea for you to spend time without having to go out much in this pandemic situation. You can make friends from different parts of the world in an old-fashioned way. So, what are you waiting for?

Written by: Cathleen XA4