New Year Pen Pal Boxes

About a year ago I signed up to #Postcircle. As many of you know, I am an avid snail-mailer and love writing and receiving letters. When I first signed up to #Postcircle, the group I was in wasn’t very active and I only ever received one letter. Over time I forgot about it, but a newsletter popped up in my inbox last year and it inspired me to get started again. As my first group hadn’t really taken off, I requested to join a new group instead. This time round I was lucky enough to be placed in a group with 5 lovely ladies who are all as snail-mail mad as I am! I have received mail from everyone in the group, and with some participants we exchange letters/parcels almost every month! I’m absolutely thrilled to be involved in such an active group this time round and I am loving getting to know the fellow members of my group.

Last year was such a chaotic year for me though, and although I always replied to my letters quickly, I felt that I didn’t have enough time to make the parcels as special as I would like. I really wanted to have the time to choose the perfect little gifts in my parcels for each recipient, or, even better, I wanted to be able to make things to exchange. At the close of 2014 I felt a little guilty that I was receiving such wonderful things in the mail that the ladies had put so much time and effort into, so I wanted to do something special to mark the new year, and a year that would give me more time to dedicate to my hobbies such as snail-mail.

I decided to send each of the participants in my group, and my US penpal from another blog, a box of wishes for the new year. After my chaotic and stressful year last year, I realised that it would be really useful  to have a box of necessities to go to if I was ever in need. But the things that I needed weren’t necessarily physical things, they were things like friendship, health and happiness. While I knew that I couldn’t send these things in the post, I decided to do the best that I could by sending something to symbolize what it was that might be needed. I picked 6 things to send; love, friendship, memories, prosperity, health and happiness, and packed them up in a box like this:

And when you open the box, you see this little card:

I wanted to create a vintage look for the box, so I chose the cover image and the tag template from Pinterest. I added the text to the card that read ‘Dear ***, Wishing you a Happy New Year and sending you best wishes for 2015. I hope your year is everything that you want it to be, but if you ever find that you are having a bad day. I hope you will find what you need in this box. Remember, sometimes it only takes a little thing to make the big problems better. Love, Hannah xx’

And inside the box? I chose the following items to represent the wishes I had picked.

Prosperity: Chocolate coins. Great for representing prosperity, but also great for eating when you haven’t got any pennies to buy chocolate. Because chocolate makes everything better in my world…

 

Memories: I picked a little notebook so that my penpals can write down the highlights of their year on its pages. To the front cover I stuck an image my colleague sent me on New Year’s Day, it says, ‘Today is the first blank page of a 365 page book. Write a good one!’ I thought it was really cute and the perfect philosophy to starting a new year. Now my penpals can write their own book for 2015 in their notepad.

 

Friendship: For friendship, I sent a little notecard and envelope with a cute pencil. Everyone in the #Postcircle group has become great friends since we started writing to each other, so what better way to remind yourself of all of your friends that surround you than by writing to them and saving their letters to you.

 

Health: In 2014 my health really suffered with the stress of everything that I had going on, and I am only just beginning to recover from it. I decided that health was definitely something that 2015 could do with, so I sent a little packet of Forever Friends tissues and some plasters with butterflies on them – two supplies that I would definitely put to use!

 

Love: What else could I really send for ‘love’ but a packet of Lovehearts? They’re sweet and they complement you as you eat them!

 

Happiness: Happiness was the trickiest wish to buy; everyone’s idea of happiness is different so I had to think of something that would make everyone happy. In the end I opted for a bath bomb because surely a relaxing bath is everyone’s idea of happiness! It smells of cherries and I even found some pink organza bags to pop them into so they look extra cute! (Pink is my idea of happiness, hence the colour choice…)

 

The day the boxes dropped through the doors of their recipients my Instagram went crazy with photos and comments! Everyone seemed pleased with their boxes which was really nice. I hope that they all liked their surprise and if they are in need of anything in 2015, they will be able to find it in there!

What do you think of the boxes? Are there any wishes you would have sent that I have missed?