Shock Your Friends and Family by Sending Them a Letter via Snail Mail

Care to send your family and friends into an unequivocal state of delightful surprise? Here's a new thought: Snail mail. That's right, real, hand delivered post office mail, each with its own delivery history passed along between multiple sets of strangers' hands straight from you to the one you love.

Email is fun, sure, and it is by far one of the most convenient, quick and easy methods of communication. But don't you ever finish checking your inbox and feel like you just want more? What ever happened to good old fashioned Happy Birthday cards, or handwritten love letters? There are just some features of traditional postal mail, or snail mail that, when compared to a typed email message, make for a much more delightful experience for not just the recipient but the sender of the card or letter as well.

There is something unspeakably magical about opening your mailbox and occasionally, amidst the hoard of advertising and direct mail postcards and credit card offers, discovering a handwritten and usually more square in shape envelope with a colorfully artistic image for postage. This is much more pleasant to receive than a generic black or red postage paid standard ink only stamp that not only lacks design but is also an impersonal indication that hundreds maybe thousands of other households are quite likely to find an identical package or envelope in their daily mail as well. It is rather amazing to realize if you stop to think about it, the evolution of communicating via written documents over time, arriving at your doorstep on horseback with a yellowing tattered envelope dated more than a week prior.

Today, between the United States Postal Service, Federal Express, UPS or one of the other many parcel and letter carriers one can exchange letters or gifts thousands of miles away in as little as a day's worth of time. We've gotten so used to this that most of us rarely stop to think about how truly incredible this is.