Postcrossing Blog

It’s less than one week until World Postcard Day, and we can feel those pens getting a little antsy in anticipation… Are we all ready for the big day? 😍 Even if you are not quite fully ready yet, there’s still time to make this the best World Postcard Day yet!

Just like last year, we’re keeping the maximum limit of 10 postcards for each postcrosser to send out on October 1st. We do this because we only have so many addresses available on any given day, and we risk running out of them. :( So, how does it work? If you only have a couple of slots available, you’ll be able to send a couple of postcards. If you have 5, you can request 5 addresses. But if you have 10 or more slots open, you’ll only be able to send 10 postcards on October 1st. Remember that you have to send one postcard on World Postcard Day in order to receive the special “WPD badge” when that card gets registered… but you don’t need to send your maximum allowance. Please be mindful of others and of the limited number of addresses available. 🙏😅

That said, we really encourage everyone to send postcards to people beyond Postcrossing who might not be expecting them: your faraway friends and relatives, the children in your family, your favorite school teachers, the hardworking fire brigade, people in your local nursing home, someone whose work you admire in your community… Anyone who could use some cheering up or support is a good candidate to receive a postcard too! If you have good suggestions for potential postcard recipients, leave them in the comments — we’d love to know whom you’re mailing your cards to on this special day.

Dinah over at The Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society suggested connecting sister cities on World Postcard Day, by sending a few postcards to your town’s twinned places. It’s a nice way to do some cultural exchange and bring distant cities together through postcards!

There are lots of Postcrossing meetups taking place a bit all over the world — more than 100 planned so far! Geocaching is also joining the festivities this year, encouraging its members to attend gatherings between September 29 and October 5 in order to receive a special World Postcard Day–themed souvenir. With so many events, it’s likely there is one close to many of you out there… so do take a look! This could be your opportunity to meet some friendly peeps who also love coming home to a postcard in their mailbox.

Another way you can participate is by taking some postcards to your local library, and talking them into offering these to patrons on October 1st! I’ve done this with my own library, and they were quite enthusiastic about the idea. And if you are in a school, remember that this is a good day to use our lesson plan (available in several languages) to teach a class about postcards, stamps and mail in general. Other ideas or photos of activities you might organize are always welcome! You can share them on this forum topic.

Finally, don’t forget that the classic dish for World Postcard Day is ravioli — they look like tiny postage stamps! Consider picking some up (or even making them!) before October 1st, so you’re ready to enjoy the day with a delicious twist.

We hope you have an amazing World Postcard Day, full of happiness, connections, and plenty of postcards! Let’s make it unforgettable and bring smiles to as many faces as possible!

Several years ago, we stumbled upon a charming photo from Lane Library at Ripon College in Wisconsin, showcasing their display for World Postcard Day, and the memory of it has lingered with us ever since. At the event, they placed a basket of fun postcards at their counter, inviting visitors to pick out one or two to send to their loved ones. It was a very simple thing, yet also a meaningful way to spread joy and celebrate World Postcard Day, while simultaneously bringing libraries (which are some of our absolute favorite places) into the festivities!

This year, we’d like to encourage you all to replicate this heartwarming idea! Check with your local library to see if they’d be open to participating. If so, all you need is a charming basket, a selection of postcards, and either our printable pamphlet or your own creative version. Once everything is set, you’re ready to spread some postcard magic in your town!

Another wonderful way to celebrate World Postcard Day is by hosting a postcard-making or writing workshop in your community. Gather some blank postcards for decorating or standard ones for writing, and invite friends and neighbors to join in. If you’re a parent, this can be a fantastic opportunity to engage children of all ages in the fun of postcard creation. There’s something so special about decorating postcards or writing heartfelt messages to friends and family. To cap off the event, consider a little excursion to the nearest postbox to send out everyone’s creations!

If you decide to take part and do something special for the day, we’d love to see it — please share your plans and snapshots with us! 😍

Have you ever heard of Geocaching? It’s a fun treasure hunt activity that consists of finding small containers (aka caches) that others have hid all around the world, aided by clues and GPS coordinates. We’ve played it for almost as long as we’ve run Postcrossing, and enjoy searching for these little canisters and tupperwares wherever we go. It’s a fun challenge and a different way to explore the world, luring us to nice places we might have otherwise missed. Some caches are hidden in picturesque parks, others in bustling urban spots — and every single one has its own story and little surprises inside, often including small trinkets left by other geocachers.

If you’re new to the hobby, we encourage you to give it a go! All you need is a smartphone with GPS to get started. There are millions of caches hidden worldwide, waiting to be discovered. But for those of you who are already part of the Geocaching community (and we know many postcrossers are also geocachers), we wanted to give you a heads-up about something special: a World Postcard Day themed souvenir!

From September 29 to October 5, 2024, Geocaching is celebrating World Postcard Day with a twist. If you attend any official Geocaching event during this period and post an “Attended log” for that event, you’ll receive a special World Postcard Day souvenir on your Geocaching account. It’s a fun way to celebrate postcards and geocaching simultaneously!

There are plenty of events happening worldwide during that week, so all you have to do is find one near you, go, and log your attendance. It’s a great opportunity to meet fellow geocachers, exchange tips, stories, and maybe even send some postcards! And if you can’t find an event near you, you can always organize one! There’s still time to plan a postcard-themed Geocaching event — and we think it would be extra fun to combine it with a Postcrossing meetup! This could be a nice way to bring together two communities that love exploration and connection.

For those of us who are both geocachers and postcrossers, this crossover event is a dream come true, combining both hobbies at once. Whether you’re exploring new cache hiding spots or mailing postcards to someone across the globe, this is a good time to share your love for adventure, discovery, and connection with others. So pack your GPS, grab a few postcards, and join the fun!

The World Postcard Day is a little over 2 months away, and we can feel the buzz of excitement starting to grow! Lots of people are eager to get started preparing for the big day (28 special meetups on the calendar already!), and we are too — so let’s talk about this year’s theme and postcard!

The theme for 2024 is “The Timeless Magic of the Post”, in honor of the 150^th anniversary of the Universal Postal Union (UPU). Founded in 1874, the UPU has played a crucial role in connecting people across the globe, fostering international cooperation between postal services and creating a unified postal network. They are an important part of what makes it possible for us to seamlessly send our postcards internationally, ensuring that they are delivered by different postal operators without us needing to worry about the intricate processes behind them. They make the magic happen!

We know some of you have been wondering when our postcard design contest will take place. We love running the contest with our judges and seeing all your creativity — it’s been a highlight of the last few years!

However, over recent years it has become harder to run a global design contest. As you may remember from last year, it can be hard to detect copyright issues with the works submitted; even when being especially careful, it’s easy for such things to slip through, as the tools we can use for that only go so far. More importantly though, we have also noticed a growing number of entries where the images were most likely done by artificial intelligence (AI) software. It’s becoming nearly impossible to tell apart AI-generated designs from the ones you pour your hearts into, and this task will only get more difficult going forward… so, after a lot of thinking, we’ve decided to switch things up this year: instead of our usual design contest, we’ve commissioned an awesome designer to create the official World Postcard Day postcard for 2024.

So, celebrating this remarkable milestone from the UPU with the theme “The Timeless Magic of the Post” was the challenge we presented to NY-based illustrator Rose Wong. You might remember Rose from this blog interview earlier this year, from the Flower Box postcard set, or maybe from one of her countless contributions to The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc. Rose brought her unique style to the assignment and created a whimsical interpretation of the theme, honoring the UPU legacy by capturing the enduring magic of postcards and mail.

We love this vibrant design, with its whirlwind of happy mail! This is just how we feel as postcrossers — like conductors of a symphony that spreads magic all around the world!

As in previous years, we’re making this postcard design available for free on the World Postcard Day page so that anyone can print it at a local printing shop or through an online service (like Vistaprint or Moo).

And as we always say, any postcard sent on October 1st is a World Postcard Day postcard — so feel free to mail this one or any other postcards you like. It’s all good! If you’re planning to send postcards on the day, we encourage you to share a picture of your cards next to a mailbox on social media, using the hashtag #WorldPostcardDay, as a way to spread the word.

And now, it’s your turn! Let’s plan some get-togethers, visits to museums and workshops, and brainstorm ways to spread some happiness into the world’s mailboxes. How are you planning to celebrate? 71 days to go!

Friends, wasn’t World Postcard Day the most glorious celebration? The amount of postcards, meetings, posts on the forum, and mentions on social media was dizzying — it felt like being inside a whirlwind of excitement, shared by people all around the world! 😍

I feel like words are not enough to convey all the excitement… but let’s make an effort to document the day, and let’s start with children! Kosovo Post organized an activity at a school in Mitrovica, where they explained postcards to students, how to fill them in with the required information, where to write the address, where to put the postage stamps, etc., and also gave postcards to the pupils to mail to their friends from other classrooms. For many, this was probably their first contact with postcards, which is brilliant! We hope many of them will go on to become postcard and letter writers in the future.

Also, the Musée de La Poste in France had a special event for children, featuring not just postcards but also storytelling, music, dancing and poetry! This was part of the events surrounding their current exhibition “Nouvelles du paradis”, which will continue until March 18, 2024. If you’ll be around Paris until then, don’t miss it! In Portugal, the team from the Communications Museum walked the streets of Lisbon, offering postage-paid postcards to passersby, worth a free entry to the museum!

Dozens of meetups took place all around the world! From Chattanooga to Vilnius, Lahti to Veliky Novgorod, Bangalore to Jakarta! We enjoyed seeing the photos pop up on the forum — as well as photos of people writing or mailing their postcards, and all the tasty ravioli and other stamp-shaped food!

Remember when we put a limit in place for the day to try to reduce the number of postcards requested on October 1st (and thus relieve a bit of the pressure on Postcrossing’s algorithm)? Well, that plan backfired spectacularly! 😂 Maybe we unintentionally made it sound like the slots were special since they were limited…? Human psychology can be a mystery sometimes. The end result was that everyone seems to have interpreted this limit as a challenge, and we had the day with the most requested postcards ever in Postcrossing, just shy of 89,000 postcards! In total and across all the timezones, close to 98,000 postcards were sent and are now slowly making their way across the world. A stressful but very happy day indeed!

Thank you to every and each of you who sent out a postcard on October 1st and made this day the most exciting day of the year! We’re grateful for the enthusiastic way in which the Postcrossing community continues to embrace the event and has thus created something special that people look forward to every year.

And before we forget, today is World Post Day! The theme of 2023's event is “Together for Trust: Collaborating for a safe and connected future”. In the traditional speech for the occasion, UPU’s Director General Mr. Masahiko Metoki emphasized the historical and current significance of post offices as trustworthy hubs for diverse services, ranging from communication and commerce to finance. Recognizing the longstanding trust communities place in postal services, the statement points out that despite their vast reach, nearly 100,000 post offices globally lack proper internet access. To address this issue, the UPU’s connect.post initiative aims to provide every post office with internet access by 2030, with the goal of ensuring digital inclusion and enhancing the range of services, especially for underserved communities. Sounds like a great project!

Happy World Post Day everyone!