So, do you have your Christmas cards ready to get mailed out? Are you looking forward to an avalanche of cards and packages (that you didn’t order from Amazon) to pour forth from your Superbox when you insert that magical key to reveal the wondrous contents inside?

Yeah, no. Mail really has changed in the last twenty or thirty years. It’s rare to open up my mailbox and see handwritten addresses in the to and from spaces. Occasionally there’s a birthday card or a thank you. But mostly the mail is a never-ending invitation to recycle a bunch of paper that I never asked for. Even bills don’t come in the mail anymore unless they’re from my offline plumber or some magazine that I never subscribed to telling me to “Pay Now!”

When I was a kid I so loved the idea of getting mail that I was okay even with getting junk mail sent to me, thrilled because it was addressed to me. In a magazine I discovered the answer to my quest to be noticed by Canada Post: a sign-up form with circles to fill in if you wanted to be “contacted” by multiple retailers. Little did they know that I was twelve years old and had no money or no idea what an onslaught of mail I was setting my parents’ mailbox up for. Not unlike my inbox when someone sells my email address without my permission.

It was mostly junk, yes, but I think I must have received occasional free samples of brand new products like cereal that I didn’t like or dishwasher soap for an appliance we didn’t own. I even became a Regal Catalog representative and pored over their magazines like they were Christmas catalogs, blissfully unaware that most of their stuff fell apart moments after you purchased it or was “not exactly as advertised”.

I did, however, also receive actual letters back then, because I also collected pen pals along with those free samples and catalogs. The Edmonton Journal had a kids page where you could get your name and address published if you were interested in writing to someone across the province or across the world. I had several “first-date” letters that never went anywhere – kind of like the swipe left of my time. But I also had a lasting correspondence with two girls, one from Winterburn, Alberta and the other from Belfast, Ireland. One taught everything about the horses she was so in love with, the other about punk rock and what it was like to have bombs blow out the windows in your living room.

Although I bemoan the fact that I don’t get any letters anymore, I’m not exactly writing them either – it’s just too easy to slough off the job of hand-writing anything to anyone anymore. Gone are the days of having to decipher someone’s handwriting, of pressed flowers or photographs falling out from between the leaves of paper, of saving such things in shoeboxes for all eternity. Because they are saveable: they’re usually thin, unique and can contain valuable information.

And so sometimes I will even print up a memorable email and paste it into a journal or fold it up like a letter and second it in a shoebox. And you can bet that I save any Christmas letter or card that I receive, for at least a little while, and if it has a handwritten note all the better. These things might take time, but then those messages can last for a lifetime.

Here’s wishing that your mailboxes will all be full of only good stuff this COVID Christmas.