A piece I wrote for the Tripbase travel blog was published today (yippee!). It’s entitled “14 Travel Traditions I wish they’d bring back”, which I was inspired to write after brainstorming a similar list for a client on storify.com (a great publishing tool for aspiring writers, by the way) called “14 forgotten items and customs we wish they’d bring back“. Why 14? Well, why not?
I think out of all the items on that list though, the number one thing I’d love to see become en vogue again would be the hand-written letter.
Imagine for a moment that you open a box in the attic and discover a stack of your grandmother’s love letters. Now imagine that those tear-streaked pages tied together with a yellow ribbon were printed emails. Not as romantic, huh?
Chances are that if the internet had been around when your grandmother was a teenager, those letters would have never even existed. They’d be sitting in the internet-dump of cyberspace, amongst the millions of spam Viagra emails and deleted cat photo chain letters. Or else they’d exist only in a cell phone memory chip, punctuated with LOLs and kissy-face emoticons.
I still have the letters my mom sent me when I was 15 and living in Japan for a summer. Email was still in its infancy back then and my host family didn’t have a computer, so most of our correspondence was via letters and doodles scrawled on pink stationary. The letters, decorated with the photo booth stickers that were popular in Japan at the time, still exist, though the emails, like my AOL email address, have long since disappeared.
I’m a terrible email writer and an even worse letter writer, but I think it’s sad that this tradition has fallen by the wayside. I’d love to see it return.
What about you?
