Do you have a New Year’s letter writing tradition? I’ve talked about Thanksgiving notes, Christmas newsletters and now it’s time to move on to what we can all do for the end of the year.
On New Year’s Eve, gather around with paper and pen and some drawing material for the kids. Have everyone sit down and write a letter to their future selves. You can talk about what your goals and ambitions are for the year, what you’d like to accomplish and, for fun, add some predictions in your letter about yourself (or others).
Put each letter in a separate envelope and mark them, “To be opened on New Year’s Eve 2009″. Pack the letters away with the Christmas ornaments so you won’t forget about them. When you get your Christmas stuff out for the following year, there they will be! Keep them on the mantle or somewhere handy until New Year’s Eve when you can open them and enjoy looking back through this handwritten portal to the past.
This is a fun exercise for family and friends to talk about what you accomplished in the future and to laugh over your “predictions” and to see what came true and what didn’t.
Try it out and let me know how it goes. Do you have any holiday letter writing traditions? Share your ideas with me!
(I also ran across a web site called FutureMe where you can do something similar, only by email.)
Tags: exercise, family, futureme, letter writing, letters, new year's eve, party game, time capsule
Hi Wendy! I wanted to thank you for your comment on my blog. I’ve become a fairly recent fan of letter writing. One thing I do that I absolutely love is participate in http://www.chemoangels.net/. It’s wonderful. I do the card angels program, which is a couple of letters or cards a week.
One thing I do on the holidays, which may or may not be helpful to people you know, is to write a note to my son who is no longer living and put it in his stocking. I did it for the third year this year, and it was nice to go back and read what I’d written the last couple of years.
I really like your New Year’s Letter idea – I think we’ll do that this year.
Mama Jamz’s last blog post..Honesty is…
Hey, thanks so much for your input! I will check out that site and be sure it’s listed in our featured sites.
What a lovely idea, your stocking tradition. I’m sorry to hear about your son, but what a nice way to still feel close in that way. My father (who has passed) and I had a very lengthy letter writing relationship. Sometimes I still write letters to him in my head because it’s a habit and that is how I felt closest to him. I hope people will read your idea and try it.
Thanks so much for stopping by!