Postcrossing Blog

It’s happening!! The new US Postcrossing stamps are now available for pre-order (with some fun extras too!), ahead of their official issue date on May 26.

We’ve been making “heart eyes” 😍 at these little triangles for weeks, and we can’t wait to start seeing them on postcards traveling all over the world. If you’d like to be ready for launch day, now is a good time to place an order!

Besides the stamp issue itself, USPS has also created a few collector-friendly items:

• Postcrossing Stamps: the stamps themselves! They come in a set of 8, so you get 2 of each design.
• Postcrossing Maxicards: set of 4 different maxicards, with stamps included so that you can mail them.
• Postcrossing First Day Covers: set of 4 envelopes.
• Postcrossing Digital Color Postmarks: set of 4 envelopes.
• Postcrossing Stamp Portfolio: includes a sheet of 8 stamps, a cancellation postcard and a collectible folio.
• Matted Stamps: features a square of 4 stamps, matted and ready to frame.

Sadly, USPS only ships within the United States… but hopefully people in other countries can find someone there willing to arrange a swap with them, if they are interested in some of these. ☺️

Happy pre-ordering! If you’re in the US and would like to celebrate this stamp issue with other postcrossers, there will be meetups happening around the launch date — including a very big one at the Boston 2026 World Expo on May 26. You can find the details (and other meetups being organized) on the events calendar.

Also, next week we’ll be publishing an interview on the blog with Antonio Alcalá, the USPS art director for this stamp issue, with some fun behind-the-scenes details. Stay tuned!

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

This month’s writing prompt was suggested by a member on the forum, and I had to have a bit of a think about how I’d answer! So we’re very curious about this one… what’s something you wish you had the courage to do?

In general, I’m pretty content with my life and don’t have a lot of regrets. That’s not to say I’m not scared of doing stuff—there are a lot of things I found difficult to start doing, like the volunteering work I did with the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the UK, or high-end raiding in Final Fantasy XIV, or applying to a dream university for further study. But I had to have a good think about something I still haven’t done because I was scared.

In the end, I think my answer is: more travel! I’ve been to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Canada and the US, and of course I’ve travelled within the UK. But I’m a bit of a homebody and I don’t travel a lot, even though there are places in the world I’d love to visit, like Germany, Greece and more of Italy… Since I mention in my profile that my wife and I like to visit zoos when we travel, I’ve had a lot of postcards suggesting destinations, and it’d be great to visit some of them, too!

It’s not impossible that I’ll travel again in future: maybe I’ll pluck up the courage someday. Where would you recommend I go, as a bookish person who likes museums?

And of course… if you’re stumped for what to write on your postcards this month, you can take this as your theme! We’d love to read your answers on the blog as well: what have you wanted to do that you’re scared to actually try?

It’s Earth Day, which means it’s time for our annual update on the tiny forest that postcrossers help grow in central Portugal!

As some of you may remember from previous years, this is an unusual kind of meetup because it has no postcards at all! Instead, we join Quercus (a Portuguese environmental organization that works on reforestation and conservation projects) and spend a morning planting trees in the Pinhal de Leiria, the historic pine forest that was devastated by the 2017 wildfires and has been slowly regaining life ever since.

This year’s planting day happened on March 14 and, as seems to be becoming tradition in recent years, it was another rainy morning. Luckily, we weren’t alone: a group from a pharmaceutical association was also planting nearby, which made the work feel lighter!

In the end, fueled by some delicious viriatos (a typical sweet from Viseu), our group of 13 postcrossers managed to plant hundreds of young pines. This year we had an enthusiastic 2.5 year old among us, and seeing kids involved in these events always gives us hope for the future. We like to imagine that one day they’ll come back for a picnic in the shade of these trees.

Earlier this year, storm Kristin hit the area and left a trail of destruction in neighboring towns, including a lot of broken trees in the forest. It was sad to see, but also a relief to notice that the trees we planted in previous years are still small enough that they survived the storm well and are still standing and growing. One day they’ll be taller than us!

Afterwards, we all went for lunch together, tired and full of sand everywhere, but very happy. These tree-planting meetups have become a favorite tradition of ours, and we’re very grateful that, year after year, postcrossers choose to spend a saturday morning planting trees in this important forest.

We’d love to see similar initiatives happening elsewhere too! If you know a local organization that could use a hand planting trees (or doing other outdoor conservation work), why not gather a few postcrossers and give it a try? 💪

Here’s to trees and postcards — and to caring for the Earth together!

The Universal Postage Union is running a letter-writing competition for young people, and the submission deadline is coming up on 5th May 2026! Given that postcrossers often love writing letters as well, we thought you’d want to hear about it here, too.

The event this year is a partnership between the UPU, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It’s a long-running competition designed to get young letter-writers 9–15 years old writing letters, in the hopes of fostering communication skills and creating international friendships. It sounds like a lovely way to get young people thinking about the power of writing letters and making connections offline, and we’d love to encourage people to join in.

This year’s theme is a really important one: “Write a letter to a friend about why human connection matters in a digital world.”

That’s a huge part of Postcrossing as well: so much happens online, but we’re still getting physical postcards, writing messages to one another, putting on stamps, and taking them to a postbox. These connections matter, brightening up people’s days, and showing that there’s a whole community of people who care enough to participate in something slow, analogue and uncertain, reaching out to random people we don’t know and leaving our little fingerprints!

If you’re 9–15 years old and you’d like to participate in the competition, or you’re someone who wants to help someone you know to join in, you can check out all the details! Just don’t forget that 5th May deadline…

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

Have you ever thought about what a biography of you would be called? Or what the individual chapters might be called? We got an interesting prompt on the forum from Simi_91 asking about that:

For me, I definitely think that the title of my memoir/autobiography or a biography of me would have to be something to do with books. For some reason I always think about the nursery rhyme, 'The House That Jack Built'… something like 'The Person That Books Built’ seems pretty apt. Books have always been a massive influence on me, after all.

I even wonder if the chapters should be named after specific books. Given that I ultimately ended up doing a degree in Infectious Diseases because of David Quammen’s book Spillover, for example, maybe the title of the chapter that just ended in my life should be 'David Quammen’s Spillover', and end with my graduation. It’d certainly make the point about how important books are to me, and previous chapters would include 'J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings' and (when I was much younger) 'Hazel Edwards’ There’s a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Eating Cake’!

As for the current chapter, well, that probably remains to be seen, really! My friends are taking bets on what I might study next and when, but I might just take a little break and spend lots of time reading everything I can get my hands on. Inspiration might be just another book away…

We’re very curious to hear ideas on what you’d call the current chapter in your own lives! You can comment here if you want to share more widely, and/or use it as a prompt for something to write on your postcards if you’re stumped!