Postcrossing Blog

World Postcard Day is celebrated every year on October 1st.

This is the anniversary of the first postcard ever sent, and we celebrate it in the best possible way: by sending postcards!

Send postcards! 😍

You can send official Postcrossing postcards through the website, but you can (and should!) also send postcards to other people in your life that could use a smile in their mailbox.

World Postcard Day goes beyond Postcrossing: it’s a day for everyone who enjoys postcards, stamps, mailboxes and handwritten messages.

On October 1st, if you request and send at least one postcard through the Postcrossing website, you’ll receive the World Postcard Day badge on your profile once that postcard is registered.

If you already have the badge from previous years, the number on it will grow by one.

So, for example, if this is your third year participating, your badge will eventually show a 3.

For the Postcrossing badge, what matters is that the postcard is requested through Postcrossing on your October 1st.

You can mail that postcard in the next few days, or as soon as possible. The postmark does not need to say “October 1st” for it to count.

The Postcrossing website shows dates in UTC, which can sometimes make things look a little confusing.

To make sure no one misses out because of timezones, postcards requested on October 1st in your own timezone count. So even if the date shown on the website looks like September 30th or October 2nd because of UTC, don’t worry: if it was October 1st where you are when you requested the address, it counts.

Eligible postcards will have a little World Postcard Day marker next to their Postcard ID on your Traveling Postcards page.

If it’s there, that postcard counts for the badge once it is registered.

This year, each member can send up to 5 postcards on October 1st.

There is a limit because World Postcard Day is a very busy day for Postcrossing. Lots of people come to the website at the same time wanting addresses, and the pool of available recipients is not infinite. If too many postcards are requested at once, we risk running out of good matches and the matching system starts having a very stressful day. Paulo also starts having a very stressful day. Please think of Paulo. 😅

No — World Postcard Day does not give anyone extra slots.

The limit is the maximum number of postcards you can send that day, if you have enough available slots.

For example:

• If you have 1 available slot, you can send 1 postcard.
• If you have 3 available slots, you can send 3 postcards.
• If you have 5 or more available slots, you can send up to 5 postcards.

So, if the badge is important to you, it’s a good idea to save at least one empty slot for October 1st, so that you can request a postcard on that day.

No! You only need to send one official Postcrossing postcard on October 1st to receive the badge once it is registered.

Sending more is fun, but not required.

You can celebrate by sending postcards to friends, family, neighbours, teachers, librarians, local firefighters, nursing homes, schools, someone who helped you recently, or anyone else who deserves one! You can also organize events and bring people together!

Any postcard you like!

We provide an official World Postcard Day design every year, so you can download this year’s postcard and then print it locally or through an online printing service.

But you don’t have to use the official design! Handmade cards, other World Postcard Day designs, postcards from your stash, tourist cards, art cards, funny cards… they all count. Any postcard is a World Postcard Day postcard if you send it on October 1st.

Yes! Many postcrossers make their own World Postcard Day postcards, and we love seeing them.

You don’t need approval from Postcrossing to create your own card, as long as it is clearly your own design and doesn’t pretend to be the official postcard.

Please don’t edit, recolour, remix or distribute altered versions of the official artwork. The official files are shared freely for everyone to use as provided.

If you’d like to use the World Postcard Day logo on your postcard, please respect its license.

Not at all!

There are lots of meetups and events being organized around the world. You can find them on the World Postcard Day events page.

And if nothing is happening near you, you can organize something small yourself — even meeting one friend for coffee and writing cards together counts as a celebration!

We’ll also have the online Postcard Lounge open again, so you can join other postcrossers around the world while writing your cards from home.

The Postcard Lounge is an online space where the community can quietly write postcards together. Everyone joins on a video call but stays muted, providing a shared little window into desks, postcards, pens, stamps, and people writing mail in different corners of the planet.

On October 1st, the lounge will be open again, so you can join others there for some shared postcard writing.

October 1st is the official day, and that’s the date that counts for the Postcrossing badge.

But events can happen around that date too, especially if a library, museum, school, postal operator or group that is meeting needs to choose a nearby weekend or another practical day. The goal is to celebrate postcards and help more people discover them.

Yes! Some postal operators and postcrossers organize special postmarks for World Postcard Day. These vary from country to country, and they get listed on the events page, when we know about them.

If you know of a special postmark, postal event or postcard activity that isn’t listed there yet, please let us know!

Anything you want to write is perfect! If you want to, you can use the opportunity to mention that you’re writing the postcard on World Postcard Day, to spread the word about this celebration! 😉

Yes, please! We love seeing your postcards, writing tables, meetups, stacks of stamps, library displays, colouring activities and happy mailboxes.

You can share photos on the forum, on social media, or wherever you usually post things. Use the hashtag #WorldPostcardDay so others can find them too.

The official World Postcard Day menu is “things that look like postage stamps”!

For the main course, we recommend ravioli. For dessert, stamp-shaped cookies. 😋