The Letter Exchange

Nowadays the main focus for postal services sometimes seems to be package delivery, or maybe it's junk mail, with the continued decline in personal correspondence by mail. But in other times and places, post offices did everything from reporting the local temperature to performing marriage ceremonies. An exhibit at a museum in New Zealand details some of what the post offices (and the old telephone systems) used to do.

The second full week in January is Universal Letter Writing Week, and this year retired letter carrier Carol Christmas challenges everyone to write a letter - or at least a card or note - each day.

Stories about postcard collections often focus on the pictures on the cards, sometimes from a standpoint of history, especially if the collection is of cards from a particular location or a particular time period. Other times they focus on the content of what people wrote on the cards - here's one of those.