“Find the Missing Letters ”

Christmas 2009 is in the rearview mirror. My decorations are stashed in the basement again, and the stack of Christmas cards and letters nags me to do something with them.

People don’t write letters much any more, and so as a self-designated family archivist I save most Christmas letters like remnants of an endangered species.

I used to write weekly letters. We lived 1,000 miles away from our parents and email hadn’t been invented yet. My mother wrote back. I saved a good portion of those letters in a fat green archival-quality notebook, waiting to provide a window into the past for that day down the road when someone wonders what kind of a woman Great-Great-Grandma Doris was.

The very presence of a letter can carry a message. After Mom died we found a basket of all the thank you notes our children had sent her for their Christmas and birthday gifts. Seeing those notes told them all over again how much she cherished them and their words.

My father wrote me a letter when I was out of the country for a term in college. He began it, “Well, you’re probably surprised to be getting a letter from your father.” He went on to tell me about Art, then my boyfriend, coming to talk with him about marrying me. It’s the only letter Dad ever wrote me, and it’s in the green notebook, too. When I read it, I hear his voice.

So tell me, what equivalent personal archive will we leave behind? I use email all the time, but my inbox and personal folders will not keep. Text messages, Twitter, and Facebook are here and gone like air through the trees. What tracks are we leaving? Will the historical record be as rich without letters?

This month do something hopelessly old-fashioned—for the future. Write a letter.

Carol Willis is a freelance writer and editor. She specializes in written communications for businesses and nonprofits and other editorial projects.