Sunday 22 December 2013

Hand Written Envelopes

Christmas card envelopes; hand written or computer generated? It’s Christmas time; the postie pushes a bunch of cards through the letter box and it’s time for another game of ‘guess the sender’. I don’t actually play this game, but Carol does. She weighs the card in her hand, forensically examines the franking marks, and judges the handwriting on style, colour and texture. Well, maybe not all that, but anyway; it’s time to guess who it’s from, which has to be done before opening the envelope.

Have no fear my friends, your card does not just get ripped open and thrown on a heap. Every part of it is used to build a picture of the sender. Once the card is out of the envelope, the back is checked first to see where it comes from, which charity it helped by the buying of it. Sometime around Tuesday we discover who actually sent it. Every last thread of sense is extracted from the cards we receive.

The handwriting on the envelope is a major part of this discovery. It takes time to hand write every envelope. Therefore the person doing it was applying thought to the process of creating the address, it would be impossible to write an envelope to a friend without thinking of them. Each handwritten envelope is a positive wish on its own even without the sentiments expressed within the card.

So why do I use the computer to produce a run of labels? Because I’m lazy. I know that a handwritten envelope is far nicer. I also know that my writing is extremely bad; it’s so bad I could illustrate a GP’s prescription like a medieval scribe embellishing the written word to magnify it. When I was at school I had a lot of trouble with spelling and taught myself to not write letters, but to use ‘word shapes’ so that the teachers couldn’t see the spelling. It’s a difficult habit to break. So, I apologise for my computer generated labels that were a novelty when I started to de them, but now just look that a reminder from a mail order company.


And to all those who hand write their envelopes, I salute you. You are sending something creative and far more personal than just a label peeled off and slapped on. Do you want me to show you how to do them; you’d save a lot of time?