wormjone
Crayons
🍀
Posts: 5
Looking for Penpals?: Yes. Global penpals welcome
Country I live in is: USA
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Post by wormjone on Jun 18, 2024 2:41:58 GMT
Sometimes I'll ask my friends when was the last time they've sent a letter that wasn't a bill; a recreational letter. They look at me like I'm crazy! I'm 24, I used to send letters all the time in the 2000s. I would send cards for my grandparents, my friends, and if the school suggested it, we would have pen pals from another state. Texting is awesome and it's great to see how far technology has come, but receiving something in the mail is certainly different. Pen pal sites are also not what they used to be. Maybe it's just me, what do you think?
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Post by Mia on Jun 18, 2024 13:28:14 GMT
The cost of postage is an issue. Domestically within the UK, the slow rate (3 working days), 2nd class is 85p (1.07 USD), and first class (supposed next day delivery) is £1.35 (1.71 USD). For overseas mail, the slow rate is £2.20 (2.79 USD), and standard rate is £2.50 (3.17 USD). The postage rates have gone up a lot since I had restarted penpalling in 2008.
I was told by an old woman (volunteer at a stately home, with an exhibition of letters sent from the Front, during WWI) that penpalling is only for children.
In a letter last night, I related an experience from 10 years ago about an adult telling a girl (I reckoned aged about 12) with birthday money not to spend it on a fountain pen because she wouldn't know how to use it.
Do your friends shun pen & paper?
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Post by stompie on Jun 18, 2024 21:12:14 GMT
I am not sure if "unpopular would be the word I would use. I think people see snail mail as inefficient, and of course, compared to an email, pricey as Mia said.
I still enjoy it immensely and even when I purchase things if it arrives with a hand written thank you note for my purchase I am quite thrilled by that - although, how someone manages to take an order made on Etsy, Ebay, Amazon etc where you type all your details and yet they still manages to misspell my name, is quite befuddling to me!
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Post by tramplingrose on Jun 19, 2024 0:44:14 GMT
I don't think it's so much unpopular as it's just something most people don't think about. Or feel like they can afford. Social media presents that perfect aesthetic that I imagine a lot of people feel pressured to copy, and that, along with postage, can get expensive. We're spoiled here in the States with (at least for now) inexpensive stamps. And I would guess a lot of people don't make or have the time to sit and write a letter, or know where to find pen pals.
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wormjone
Crayons
🍀
Posts: 5
Looking for Penpals?: Yes. Global penpals welcome
Country I live in is: USA
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Post by wormjone on Jun 19, 2024 7:57:31 GMT
Reading all these responses, I now understand why people don't write as many letters, at least recreationally. It's a shame, particularly the costs of shipping (I inherited a hefty bag of forever stamp rolls from my grandparents, so I'm a bit spoiled in that aspect... it doesn't stop me from buying more though). My friends are... modern. I don't want to say that they shun pen and paper, but they like to rag on me when I mention writing letters instead of sending a text.
I can definitely understand if people feel pressured into copying an aesthetic and the costs that go into it, particularly younger people. However, I'll ask my cousins and siblings (21 of them, all between the ages of 23 and 5, I'm the eldest!) if they've ever written and sent a letter, even if it was for a school pen pal program. They all said no! Granted, it's less accessible to do and more time consuming, but I guess I assumed it was something that everybody did at one point in their lives.
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Post by radellaf on Jun 19, 2024 20:40:52 GMT
For all my friends who never write a letter, or do more than sign a card, they all sure seem to enjoy when I send them one.
They've never said anything about enjoying one of my emails.
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escorpio
Pencils
Posts: 93
Looking for Penpals?: Perhaps. It depends...
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Post by escorpio on Jun 20, 2024 7:40:33 GMT
As always it's hard to know what's the chicken and what's the egg. In Sweden the postage price has gone up very much (from 7 SEK to 18 SEK in the past 10 years), whereas the service has gone down. We now only get mail delivered every other day (one week Mon-Wed-Fri, the next Tue-Thu, adjusted for bank holidays), and recently they mail company came out with that they are going to empty the mail boxes for outgoing mail in the same manner, as well as reducing the number of mail boxes. So, if want to send someone a birthday card, how would I know when to mail it to get it to arrive on (or at least near) the proper date?
Back in 2009 the Swedish post went from being a company owned by the state and merged with the Danish postal company, known for high prices and a once a week delivery. So we're still "better" than them. However, the question is if snail mail is getting unpopular or the mail system is getting so much worse that people just shy away from it?
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Post by penguy on Jun 20, 2024 14:03:56 GMT
It seems that postal rates are going up and service is going down in postal services world wide. On July 14th postal rates increase in the USA so I am going to purchase forever stamps ahead of the increase. Some days I receive no mail and some days the letters aren't even picked up at my box. I think with online shopping and internet advertising there is less volume to keep things going so postal rates go up. I don't think the current postmaster general is actually that interested in improving the postal service. I figured with the rate increase, if I send the same number of letters as last year it will cost me over $200 in postage. If you look at it another way it gives me a great deal of pleasure and if I were to collect tractors I would need a shed instead of a basket and it would probably cost a lot more.
One thing I have done is encouraged my grandson to have a pen pal and they are exchanging postcards ( my grandson is a man of few words) but he is writing. I matched up another two upper elementary students and hope they are enjoying the experience. Perhaps those of us who know the joy of letters need to sow a few seeds.
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Post by stompie on Jun 21, 2024 15:14:57 GMT
They've never said anything about enjoying one of my emails. and I doubt no one ever has said, "Man, that was a lovely text message from you. I am going to save it so my Grandkids can read it one day!"
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Post by ginny on Jun 22, 2024 13:32:23 GMT
I'm not sure if letter writing ever was really popular as a hobby for the masses. It probably was more of a necessity because there was no other means of communication for many people. When I was a kid, we didn't have a telephone (I was 6 when we finally got one), and communicating by telephone was expensive, so even with relatives who lived further away, you communicated via letters, unless you wanted to convey something really urgent (usually that was a birth or a death in the family!), provided your counterpart had a telephone available! There also were telegrammes for those who didn't, but they were expensive, plus you had to go to the post office to have them sent, so you didn't send them on a whim. I remember we were the only family in the village that didn't have relatives nearby, one of my aunts lived abroad, the other side of the family lived in what was East Germany back then, so - we always were a letter writing family. My grandmother had a penfriend in Sweden (that was in the 60s/70s), that was regarded as 'outlandish' and 'strange'. I think most people saw letter writing as a means of 'staying in touch via pen and paper because there's no other way'. I got my first penpals by responding to ads in youth magazines (and my longest-standing correspondence started this way in early 1979, so we've been writing for over 45 years now), an attempt at finding penpals via International Youth Service (some of you might remember them, the organisation folded some years ago) wasn't successful, but I tried other services later on. They all had a fee so they could survive and provide the service (as opposed to nowadays when you can find penpals via the internet without spending any money to get their addresses!). I'm still in touch with some folks I met that way in the 80s. I remember many of my classmates tried those services (out of curiosity and to get a whiff of the big world out there!), but few contacts really lasted as most people lost interest as life got busy or simply didn't know what to write. Plus there's the language barrier, of course - unless you spoke English well enough, you were a bit limited with choice! With the advent of the internet, it has become easier to find people to write to, at the same time, all the convenient (and apparently less costful) means of communication like e-mailing, texting, face-timing, skyping and what not came up, and more people fell off the snail mail wagon - and as escorpio pointed out, that went along with higher postal rates and declining service, so more people decided to go the seemingly easier way of communicating via e-mail. You need patience and stamina / perseverance to maintain an ongoing correspondence, and with the instant gratification society that we've become, those traits are harder to find in people, I'd say I sometimes get comments from local friends saying that they wouldn't know what to write about because they don't have an interesting life. When I ask 'well, what do you talk about with your local friends', they come up with all sorts of topics, and I point out that I write about all these things in my letters. That seems to surprise some folks. They have a hard time understanding that writing letters is not like writing a feature story about an event or a celebrity, but more about getting to know someone, exchanging thoughts and becoming friends.
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Post by Gilly on Jun 23, 2024 20:13:14 GMT
However, I'll ask my cousins and siblings (21 of them, all between the ages of 23 and 5, I'm the eldest!) if they've ever written and sent a letter, even if it was for a school pen pal program. They all said no! Granted, it's less accessible to do and more time consuming, but I guess I assumed it was something that everybody did at one point in their lives. That is SO sad and shocking to hear to be honest They are missing out on such a fabulous hobby and the thrill of hearing the letterbox rattle as the postie drops letters & postcards through. Not to mention the sheer joy and satisfaction of the actual writing....choosing the perfect paper and pen....addressing and decorating the envelope and then dropping it into the mailbox or handing it over the counter at the post office. I must admit it probably does seem ridiculously expensive but compared to other hobbies (or magazines, junk food, chocolate, alcohol!) I think it is still a lot of fun for a few pennies Genuine question - Do schools even teach handwriting with a pen or pencil nowadays or is everything done on a keyboard & computer? I'm childfree so don't know what's going in schools. When I worked at McDonald's and most of my workmates were younger than me I was often bamboozled by some of the lessons they did in school/college/university?
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escorpio
Pencils
Posts: 93
Looking for Penpals?: Perhaps. It depends...
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Post by escorpio on Jun 24, 2024 8:14:45 GMT
I'm not sure if letter writing ever was really popular as a hobby for the masses. It probably was more of a necessity because there was no other means of communication for many people. When I was a kid, we didn't have a telephone (I was 6 when we finally got one), and communicating by telephone was expensive, so even with relatives who lived further away, you communicated via letters, unless you wanted to convey something really urgent (usually that was a birth or a death in the family!), provided your counterpart had a telephone available! There also were telegrammes for those who didn't, but they were expensive, plus you had to go to the post office to have them sent, so you didn't send them on a whim. I remember we were the only family in the village that didn't have relatives nearby, one of my aunts lived abroad, the other side of the family lived in what was East Germany back then, so - we always were a letter writing family. My grandmother had a penfriend in Sweden (that was in the 60s/70s), that was regarded as 'outlandish' and 'strange'. I think most people saw letter writing as a means of 'staying in touch via pen and paper because there's no other way'. This story about penpalling between Germany (?) and Sweden made me think of Astrid Lindgren, world-famous author, avid correspondant. A few years ago I read a correspondence of hers and Louise Hartung who lived in pre-wall West Berlin (late 1950s, the Wall was built during the correspondance). They wrote frequently and in one letter Astrid laments "you sent this letter on Tuesday and it didn't arrive until Friday"; she thought a 3 day delivery from Berlin to Stockholm in the 1950s was a long time to wait. And now that's how long it takes to send a domestic letter to my in-laws, 2 hours by car away.
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Post by ginny on Jun 24, 2024 10:23:53 GMT
I'm not sure if letter writing ever was really popular as a hobby for the masses. It probably was more of a necessity because there was no other means of communication for many people. When I was a kid, we didn't have a telephone (I was 6 when we finally got one), and communicating by telephone was expensive, so even with relatives who lived further away, you communicated via letters, unless you wanted to convey something really urgent (usually that was a birth or a death in the family!), provided your counterpart had a telephone available! There also were telegrammes for those who didn't, but they were expensive, plus you had to go to the post office to have them sent, so you didn't send them on a whim. I remember we were the only family in the village that didn't have relatives nearby, one of my aunts lived abroad, the other side of the family lived in what was East Germany back then, so - we always were a letter writing family. My grandmother had a penfriend in Sweden (that was in the 60s/70s), that was regarded as 'outlandish' and 'strange'. I think most people saw letter writing as a means of 'staying in touch via pen and paper because there's no other way'. This story about penpalling between Germany (?) and Sweden made me think of Astrid Lindgren, world-famous author, avid correspondant. A few years ago I read a correspondence of hers and Louise Hartung who lived in pre-wall West Berlin (late 1950s, the Wall was built during the correspondance). They wrote frequently and in one letter Astrid laments "you sent this letter on Tuesday and it didn't arrive until Friday"; she thought a 3 day delivery from Berlin to Stockholm in the 1950s was a long time to wait. And now that's how long it takes to send a domestic letter to my in-laws, 2 hours by car away.
Well... Astrid Lindgren had a point there, although in her case, it was a delivery between two big cities, and we are talking about correspondence between rural Germany and rural Sweden in my grandmother's case. When I was a kid, there was postal delivery on either Christmas or Boxing Day (25th/26th December). Plus I remember that on certain days we received post two times a day. Admittedly, that was in the late 60s / early 70s, so it's quite a while ago. Postal mail just does not have the same vital significance anymore that it had back then because we have so many other means of communication.
In Germany, the domestic delivery times will get longer from next year on. At the moment, it's a 1-2 day delivery time, from 2025 on it will be longer - and of course, postage will get more expensive. I'm not complaining - this is my hobby, and it brings me joy, so it's not like I will stop sending letters. I'm all for giving posties fair wages as well, and I know that the infrastructure needs to get maintained. And in comparison to other countries, Germany still isn't all that bad with postage rates as long as you stay within the standard sizes and weight zones.
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Post by ginny on Jun 24, 2024 10:29:13 GMT
However, I'll ask my cousins and siblings (21 of them, all between the ages of 23 and 5, I'm the eldest!) if they've ever written and sent a letter, even if it was for a school pen pal program. They all said no! Granted, it's less accessible to do and more time consuming, but I guess I assumed it was something that everybody did at one point in their lives. That is SO sad and shocking to hear to be honest They are missing out on such a fabulous hobby and the thrill of hearing the letterbox rattle as the postie drops letters & postcards through. Not to mention the sheer joy and satisfaction of the actual writing....choosing the perfect paper and pen....addressing and decorating the envelope and then dropping it into the mailbox or handing it over the counter at the post office. I must admit it probably does seem ridiculously expensive but compared to other hobbies (or magazines, junk food, chocolate, alcohol!) I think it is still a lot of fun for a few pennies Genuine question - Do schools even teach handwriting with a pen or pencil nowadays or is everything done on a keyboard & computer? I'm childfree so don't know what's going in schools. When I worked at McDonald's and most of my workmates were younger than me I was often bamboozled by some of the lessons they did in school/college/university? They have other things that bring them joy nowadays. My niece (soon to be 16) thinks letterwriting is outdated and pointless. What would you write to a stranger you might never meet? And why decorate envelopes when they and up in the trash, anyway? She knows how to handwrite, but rarely ever does it, unless she has to. So, my collection of pens is ridiculous to her. By the same token, all the computer games that she has (Hogwarts-related, mostly!) are ridiculous to me. So, each to their own, I'd say. And lots of folks of my generation aren't into writing letters, either. So, it's not only a generational thing, I suppose.
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Post by radellaf on Jun 24, 2024 19:59:16 GMT
I've kept some decorated envelopes (or cut-out parts of them). I wouldn't care what happens to the envelope later. I enjoy looking at my "art" on the counter the night before mailing, and I hope it stands out when it's received. That's enough. I do wonder if, for the illustratively talented, the envelopes I consider worthy of using as wall art take them about as much time as I use to draw on some abstract lines. I still have a spider drawing, that was on the corner of an envelope, posted up in a corner of the room. Unlike the real spiders, it has been well-behaved and _stays_ up there. My collection of pens is ridiculous to me. As is World of Warcraft, my one video game. But, hey, they're both fun, too. The game is $150 a year. The pens are... more.
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