My nephew, who is in grad school for English Lit. I just got a thank you e-mail from him for his birthday gift and it is a LETTER. A lovely, chatty, personal, relevant letter. Such a charmer.
I especially love the letters penned in ink on paper one can pull out years later and read again, but tell you what, Tibs.......a letter by any means is a lovely gift and a far cry from a forwarded email oo a text message in 'shorthand'.
Letters are a gift of a person's time and attention, and if you think about it, that is the most precious gift you can give another. It is every parent's duty to teach their child to acknowledge generosity in others. And, it's the mark of an adult to have learnt it.
Funny, there was a segment on this very topic just this morning on CBS Sunday Morning. Obviously the message skewed in favor of writing thank-you notes. One of the guests even wrote a book. Can't remember the title but "365" was in the title. The book was an overview of the 365 thank-you notes he'd written, and how they affected some of the recipients. The overall message of the segment seemed to be, it never hurts to be polite and you never know how it might make a difference to someone else.
Personal messages are so appreciated compared to fast forwards, have seen most of them any way. Your nephew will go far in his life and many will wonder how he did it.
Letter writing must be on the minds of lots of folks lately. This week on the CBC they played a bit of a documentary about letter writing. The main part was about how young people are sort of rebellious in wanting to write and receive letters. One girl said that she enjoyed the act of writing because when she is writing a letter she was more likely to be spontaneous where as writing on the computer or such device she would be much more likely to edit. Which I thought was funny for me its the opposite. I'm more likely to send or post quickly but for me a hand written letter gets more editing. Anyway this girl was part of a group of people who got together at a coffee shop. They would pick out thier paper envelopes and write someone a letter. Listening to some of the kids talk about the novelty of sending and getting letters brings home how much has changed. (and Iam not THat much older then these folks.) I wonder what my Grandmother would think of them, she has always sent and recieved letters to keep in touch.
tibs, posted that her nephew sent her an email letter. mjmercer mentioned a letter segment on Sunday Morning, I saw that show. And frogged also mentions that CBS had a bit on letter writing. Something is going on about letter writing since the "Big Boys" and college grads are getting into letter writing. Can letter writing compete with a short little twitter?
When the 20th Century was about to turn into the 21st Century I bought a book called 'Letters Of The Century" - it's a thick treasure that begins in 1900 with a letter from a man to his son in which he mourns the demise of letter writing...the book filled with letters then goes on until it become about 2.5 inches thick. It ends with an email. A wonderful, wonderful book. It send with an email.