Letters!

Ok! You all got me, I had written the table manners post before...but how come more of you commented this time around and not before??!!! I guess second time around either I got the point across or I forced it on you! Either way...mission accomplished :P

Now to my new post...

As a little girl growing up I loved to write letters. I wrote them to my friends in Chennai once in a while and whenever they replied I was always overwhelmed with joy. But they were not as enthusiastic as I was. I wondered about pen pals and my mother put an end to it by telling me that I was too young to write letters to strangers. So till I was in eleventh standard I quit letter writing altogether.

In eleventh I made friends with my neighbor and unfortunately for me the very same year he was moving out of town to start college. I don't know who started it but we soon started writing to each other once in a while at the beginning. It would be in a simple inland letter, the blue colored one that you got at the post office for like 10 Paisa or something. Then we started writing on the crimps of the letter that we had to switch over to writing in the yellow colored envelopes. It seemed to everyone in my house that other than my father I was the only other person who got a mail at least two or three times a week.

I spent a lot of time writing in my sometimes neat sometimes nasty hand writing. Long letters that extended to 8 or 14 pages in a A4 sheet. I would write about teenage problems, classmates, bitchy stuff, school, etc., and he would write back making fun of it or tried to push me in the right directions. We spoke movies, food, and of course whatever, I don't even remember now. But it was fun expecting to see a letter in the mailbox. It was also the time when stickers were popular. I would spend money on buying cutesy ones and stick them all over.

My friend was prompt, he would send me greeting cards for the appropriate reasons and seasons and I would too, we had so much fun. But then somehow slowly, as they say about all good things, this one too slowly met with a natural death. It might have had something to do with the fact that my friend moved back to Chennai after his education and there was really no need to write to him, or that I was in college and busy travelling to and fro between home and college. I also moved away from that neighborhood and then no more letters.

I miss the excitement of getting a letter from a friend or someone in the family. The excitement with which I read them. The whole fun is missed out on opening and reading emails. One line emails suck even more, the kind that I am sending more often to friends nowadays.

I love the tradition of sending Season's Greetings cards though. I used to help father work on several cards he would send out to his friends, family, & colleagues when I was a little girl. I helped him with writing the addresses, inserting them into the envelopes and pasting the stamp on them before mailing them out for him. It was fun and I love that tradition and would like to keep it going...

Now with technology of course most of us wish each other electronically for every festival but I make sure that most of my friends with whom I am in regular touch with receive a card from my family...

So this year...to you and yours...Seasons Greetings!

Love
ART