A friendly reminder from Tracy Peacock: it’s already time to get onto your Christmas cards, and into the real reason for the season.
Most people have given up on the tradition of posting Christmas cards or letters. At best, they may shoot off an e-card featuring a dancing reindeer. Opening it is a pleasure that lasts all of three seconds.
I’m old enough to remember a magical time when the mantelpiece bulged with Christmas cards from friends and family. They would linger there for a month or more bubbling with news and loving wishes.
I haven’t abandoned this longer-lasting pleasure. Now, it’s November and my cards for Christmas are already carefully sorted into two joyful bundles – for international friends, and for local friends and family. Over the years, my enthusiasm for connecting by mail has seen me dispatch not only cards at Christmas, but also hundreds of birthday cards, postcards and letters.
My devotion to snail mail intensified back in 2020 when I heard about a pen pal exchange that began in the US in the early months of COVID-19. I hadn’t written to a pen pal since the 1970s: I was in primary school when I scrawled a couple of letters to Inge in Germany but the correspondence was short-lived.
I signed up, and my cards, letters and postcards have since been dispatched around the world to places as far-flung as New York, Dublin, Sheffield, Houston, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Berlin, Stockholm and Washington DC. I’ve written to more than 20 women in seven countries. Not all have kept in contact, but a handful have continued to share wise and intimate fragments of their lives. These women will be among the first to receive my cards for Christmas over the next few weeks.
I’ve strung together sentences about the weather, bushfires, floods, pets, walking, books, food, films and the pandemic. Questions about my pen pals’ lives, thousands of kilometres away: How is your latest scan? Deeply sorry to hear about your mother. How did you spend your holidays? Is it snowing yet? I’m keen to understand what they observe, feel, read and watch.
In return, they’ve sent gut-punching stories about putting parents into aged care and farewelling children to university far from home. Tender chronicles of welcoming babies, adopting rescue dogs and embracing new relationships. Passages of poetry and musings on museums. Reflections on reading and commentary on films. My pleasure in reading these generous letters, sometimes seven or eight pages long, has not diminished since the first one arrived on a golden day in November 2020. As I began reading, I had to pull a crumpled tissue from my pocket to wipe my eyes.
What strikes me about the writers is their sense of trust in sharing so much with someone they’ve never met in real life. I now have four shoe boxes piled high with kindness. They nestle under my study desk, where I keep them safe. There are letters with small gifts like stickers, vintage postcards and bookmarks. I think about the dozens of letters I’ve sent: do the recipients relish them in this same way?
My letter-writing craze has had other positive side effects. The local postie has told me how he loves delivering my mail, delighting in the interesting international stamps and decorations from my pen pals: turquoise, mustard and coffee-coloured handmade envelopes; a cream envelope with multi-coloured flying butterflies, my name and address in calligraphy. It’s also spawned my own stationery obsession, resulting in piles of postcards, local letterpress printed cards, boxed Virginia Woolf cards and Japanese writing paper.
Another upshot of my letter writing came in December last year when my son, who had moved to Melbourne from Perth, sent me a Christmas card.
“Did you know how to buy a stamp?” I texted him.
“Yes, I did. But I did google how to do it, in case I was missing something!” he replied. “Even though I didn’t write much, I thought it would mean more than writing a longer text.”
He was right. I put his card on the sideboard in the lounge room and added the envelope to one of my shoeboxes.
Writing letters and cards soothes my soul and creates a space for reflection. It’s one way that I connect and let people know I care in a time that may not always be merry. Over the coming days, I look forward to making space on my desk, boiling the kettle, putting pen to paper and keeping the postie busy!
By Tracy Peacock
Tracy Peacock lives in Perth and writes creative non-fiction and flash fiction. Her short fiction was longlisted for the 2025 Newcastle Short Story Award.
Published in ed#750
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