101 Cards for World Postcard Day
The letter-writing group I am a part of asked if I would do a writeup of my WPD experience, and I thought: Hey, free blog material! So here's a version of what I wrote formatted for this blog. Please enjoy and I'm excited to now be a part of the cohort of blogs that haven't been abandoned with just one entry sitting on them!
Happy World Postcard Day, everyone! If you're someone who's received a letter from me before EVER, there is currently a special postcard on its way to you!
Today I finish my months-long task of writing & sending out a postcard to every single person I have an address for! The outgoing mail came out to 101 postcards!
In the past few years my impulsiveness in buying postcards has increased dramatically, to where I had a pretty sizeable collection. Around the time I was wondering if I was in need of a downsizing, I learned that October 1st is World Postcard Day, and I hatched a plan: I would send out a postcard to every single address I have written in my address book. I had completed letter-writing challenges such as InCoWriMo before, but even so, I knew this was going to be a daunting task. Luckily I had the idea several months ahead of October 1st, so I had plenty of time to start writing and prepare. The first postcards to get written were done around the middle of August.
I possess many addresses from friends & family I know in person, as well as a core group of online friends (shout-out DOMINO CLUB). But roughly 50% of the addresses that these postcards went to came from one source: r/RandomActsofCards. This is a subreddit I discovered in June of this year and instantly fell in love with. At its core, it's a forum where people offer to send cards and request to receive cards. People will also post thank-yous on the subreddit when they receive mail, and the moderators meticulously keep track of who has given thank-yous to whom. You get a colored badge next to your name to show how many thank-yous you've gotten. (Last I saw, the person with the highest amount thank-yous was somewhere over 8,000!) The prospect of having a huge community of people to send cards to combined with just that little bit of gamification made this such a tantalizing thing to participate in. I also just so happened to make this discovery around the same time I had opened up my own P.O. Box - perfect timing!
So this summer I sent and received a lot of cards to people in RAoC. Subsequently, I got a lot of people's addresses! With IRL friends and close pen pals, I write their addresses in a little book that gets tucked in the Snail Mail Supplies pouch that I keep. Now that I was obtaining a lot of addresses through DMs on Reddit, I decided to make a dedicated master Google spreadsheet to keep track of them all.
Typically when I send a postcard, I like to shrink my handwriting down real small and cram as much writing as I can onto the card. I knew right away that it would not be feasible to do that with the sheer amount of cards that I needed to complete, so all of the postcards have varying amounts of writing on them. I tended to write more on cards going to closer friends, whereas basically all of the RAoC recipients just got a simple "Hope you have an awesome day!" message. I made kind of a funny decision to write all of my messages from the perspective of me on October 1st, even if the card was written 2 months before that! This led to a lot of messages talking about what I'm excited for in October...to be fair, there's a lot to be excited for! (Most notably my BIRTHDAY! 🎉)
My hopes for this project were that I wouldn't have to buy any new postcards & just use up ones from my existing stash. That ended up being the case! The majority of the postcards I sent out were from this boxed set I had containing 100 floral-themed postcards. I had originally bought the box before I was even into sending postcards that much, thinking that I would use them as scrapbooking material. I had used some but found it difficult to cut-and-paste with them, being that the paper was so thick. There seemed to be a good chunk of cards left, but I used them all up fairly quickly! For the rest I just used random other cards from my collection. One of my favorites I sent out is probably this postcard with a Pride & Prejudice quote on it, which went to my mom, who is the HUGEST Jane Austen fan on the planet.
I did not buy postage all-at-once for this challenge, but would get a sheet or two of stamps whenever I found myself at the post office. The final count of postcards I sent was 76 domestic and 25 international. So that means going off of current US postage rates ($0.61 for a postcard stamp and $1.70 for an international stamp), I spent a grand total of $88.86 on postage for this project!
As much fun as this whole undertaking was, I probably would not do it again and I don't think I would recommend this as a challenge to anyone else. There were a lot of drawbacks that came with it: Firstly, it took up a lot of my free time. At any given moment I have several personal projects that I'm working on (*cough cough* remember when I said I was going to make zines this year...?) and many of them fell to the wayside to make more time for postcard-writing. I don't know if the accomplishment of finishing this challenge outweighs the guilt of leaving other things untouched. Secondly, I was very worried about my address list becoming way too long for me to handle, so I cut myself out of other opportunites to send mail that I otherwise would have gone for. Making more offers on RAoC would mean more addresses on my list, which means more postcards due on October 1st!
All in all, I definitely felt the pressure more acutely with this challenge than any of my experiences with InCoWriMo, so I think I'll just stick to that from now on. (Although the amount of postcards I sent today is enough to make up at least 3 InCoWriMos so I may be taking a break from that next year!) I'm looking forward to going back to writing letters and postcards at my own pace.
Anyway, I am hoping and praying that every single postcard gets to its destination safely. If you get one in the mail, let me know! Or even better, write a postcard back!