The students in my Social Media Strategy class are required to create a blog and post on it at least four times during the semester. I’m always amazed at their interests and how they want to present themselves. Last semester, one student began a blog about, of all things, letter writing!

A woman after my own heart.

I have long been a fan of letters — pretty stationery, matching envelopes, a return address, an address, a colorful stamp. In my junior-high days, I even had a kit where I could melt a little bit of wax on the back of the envelope and press it with a brass monogram to create a seal (so very royal of me, I know). Letters were how I stayed in touch, how I let people know I was remembering them. And I wanted to do that. It was important to me.

As a college student in the 1970s, seeing that diagonal line of a leaning envelope through the window of my college mailbox meant — YAY! — mail! It meant a card from a high school friend, an update from my parents or grandparents or numerous aunts and cousins. Once in a while I received thick updates from my high school friends. They usually wrote on notebook paper, pages and pages (I recall one 17-page tome), front and back, numbered pages, with their familiar handwriting. They were the friends who had scattered to the winds after high school in Bonn, Germany. Some came back to the States, others stayed on in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, or if they were ambassadors’ kids they often went back to their home country for college. We missed one another and were hungry for news. We’d been deep in one another’s lives for years — formative years — and we cared about where life was taking us in our various corners of the world.

Later, after college, by far the BEST mail was another thick envelope, a round-robin letter. Two sets of my college friends started these letters to keep us in touch. Instead of writing separate letters to the other three in a group, we could write one letter, pop it in an envelope, and send it to the next person on the list. Then each person put in a letter.

When the round-robin envelope came back, I sat for an entire evening reading three thick letters overflowing with news from my dearest friends. Then I pulled out my old letter, re-read it, and wrote a new one with news picking up from where the last one left off. I added my new letter to theirs and sent the whole batch on. Sometimes it took a few months for the envelope to arrive back. Sometimes photos were included — an engagement ring, a wedding, a new baby. We hugged one another from afar, again caring about lives who had become so much a part of our own.

Then along came email and Facebook and our letters went out of style. With a click we could upload pictures. We could follow one another’s lives. We could email and copy everyone else and not have to wait for months.

As nice as that is, I miss those thick letters. Probably for the same reason that I love books over e-books, I love letters over e-mail.

But if it means communication, I’m happy for anything.

Yet there IS something about a letter. As it says in this post from The Pen Company, “8 reasons to send snail mail today,” sending a letter shows you care, it’s “on a whole other level.”

I am a sucker for stationery and note cards. I try to send handwritten thank-yous at least. But I’d like to get back to taking the time to connect with the people who matter most to me. The ones who shaped my life in one way or another.

Because a letter shows a whole other level of caring. And that’s what I want to show as well.

What about you? Do you still write letters?