World Letter Writing Day
Next: September 1, 2027
Pen, paper, and someone worth the postage.
The story
Where it comes from
World Letter Writing Day was started in 2014 by Richard Simpkin, an Australian author and photographer, after a decade spent writing to people he admired for his book Australian Legends and being moved by the handwritten replies. He chose 1 September and asked people to write one real letter a year.
How it's celebrated
People write a letter by hand to someone who does not expect it, post it, and often photograph it. Schools use the day for letter-writing lessons; stationery shops and postal services in Australia, the UK and Japan run promotions, and pen-pal communities swap addresses.
Did you know
- The oldest surviving personal letters are clay tablets from Mesopotamia, some four thousand years old.
- Japan still has a strong letter culture: seasonal greeting postcards (nengajō) number in the billions each New Year.
- The word 'post' comes from the Latin posita, the fixed stations where relay riders changed horses.
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