Postcrossing Blog

Is everyone ready for the postcardiest day of the year? We hope so, because it’s only one week until World Postcard Day is heeeeeere! This will be the sixth year we organize the festivities to celebrate the best means of communication ever, and we can’t wait for an avalanche of postcards to flood the world’s mailboxes with smiles!

We have a long list of topics to go over, so this time I’m going to switch things up and turn them into a literal list. Here we go!

• First things first: make sure you have enough postcards and stamps on hand! You wouldn’t want to run out on this day, right? 😅
• Like in previous years, each postcrosser can send up to 10 postcards on October 1st so that we don’t run out of addresses on the website. If this is your first time celebrating the day with us, please read this to understand how things works.
• There’s something new this year: the postcards that count for the WPD badge will have a little star ⭐️ next to their Postcard ID on the Traveling Postcards page. So even if the date on the postcard says 30 September or 2 October — if it has a star, it counts!
• But don’t stop at Postcrossing postcards: send some extras too! This is the perfect day to write to friends & family (near and far!), inspiring teachers, kind librarians, neighbors, co-workers or even the residents of a local nursing home. Reach out of your bubble and use the day to put smiles out there in the world.
• If you’re in Germany, Portugal, the UK or the USA, there are special postmarks you can use on your postcards too!

• Sooooo many meetups are taking place these days — check out all the stars on the map! It’s the perfect time to meet postcard friends (or make new ones) and celebrate together. And if you’re a geocacher, don’t forget: attending an event next week will earn you the World Postcard Day souvenir on your Geocaching account!
• Make plans to join us on the Postcard Lounge for a bit! Grab some postcards and a drink, and reserve some time to join this cozy livestreamed get-together, where we quietly write postcards in each other’s companionable silence.
• The official menu for the day is “things that resemble postage stamps”: we recommend ravioli for the main course, and stamp-shaped cookies for dessert. 😋
• Share some pictures with the community, either on the forum or elsewhere on the web, with the hashtag #WorldPostcardDay! We love seeing how this day looks from other people’s perspective.

And that’s all for now! As shown by all the exclamation marks on this blog post, we’re pretty excited and can’t wait to celebrate World Postcard Day with all of you next week!

Every year on September 21st, the International Day of Peace is celebrated around the world. It’s a reminder that peace isn’t just the absence of conflict, but something we actively build in our daily lives, in the way we treat ourselves, our neighbors, our communities, and the planet. Small gestures of kindness, understanding, and cooperation add up, like stitches in a fabric, creating something stronger and more beautiful together.

This year’s theme for the International Day of Peace is Act Now for a Peaceful World. It’s a call to remind us that peace isn’t something abstract or far away: it’s built through our daily choices and actions. From standing up against unkindness, to listening to voices different from our own, to volunteering in our communities, each of us can play a part.

This year, several postal administrations joined forces to celebrate peace in a very tangible way: through a special embroidered postage stamp. The “Dove of Peace” stamp is literally stitched out of thread by the Austrian embroidery house Hämmerle & Vogel, and features a dove carrying an olive branch. It’s being issued jointly by postal services from Åland, Armenia, Austria, Barbados, Cyprus, Faroe Islands, Greenland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the three offices of the United Nations.

More than just a philatelic novelty, the embroidered Dove of Peace stamp is meant as a symbol and a commitment. Like embroidery, peace requires patience, daily effort, and care. And through the vast network of the postal system, this little dove can fly around the world carrying its message of hope and unity.

To celebrate this initiative and World Peace Day, Austria Post and Liechtenstein Post have kindly offered us 20 of these embroidered stamps to give away (10 from each country).

To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment below sharing a small act of kindness or gesture of peace that has brightened your day recently. Comments will be opened until October 5, at which point we’ll draw 20 winners at random and have one of these special stamps mailed to them.

On this World Peace Day (and every day!), may our small acts of kindness and connection (like a postcard, a smile, or a shared story) add up to something bigger!

What is an address, really? What does it contain? For most of us, it’s just a number and a street name — a practical and short format that guides mail to a specific destination. But in some places, like Costa Rica, addresses are more like giving directions, in a way to combines memory, poetry, and community. Instead of “123 Main Street”, you might be sending a postcard to an address that looks like “100 meters south of the church, across from the old tree”. Sometimes the landmarks are not even there anymore, but their memory still guides postcards and people home.

María Luisa Santos and Carlo Nasisse made a short film, Direcciones, exploring how Costa Rican addresses weave together all these different elements, keeping alive the traces of landmarks that once existed and the stories of the people who lived around them.

For us, who depend on addresses to connect strangers around the globe, it’s a beautiful reminder that behind every line on an address there’s also history, loss, poetry and love for a place.

PS: If you’re interested in the topic, check out this previous video explaining the Japanese addressing system!

Remember last year, when we invited you all to poke your local libraries to join the World Postcard Day? Some of you did, and we later saw pictures of many nice library events!

This year, we’d love to see even more libraries of all kinds join the fun. Whether it’s your local library, a school library, or even a Little Free Library in your neighborhood, putting up a poster and sharing some postcards there is the perfect way to invite visitors to celebrate the day! All you need is a nice basket, a stack of postcards, and one of our printable pamphlets (updated in this year’s World Postcard Day’s color!) to get people inspired.

In previous years, we’ve also mentioned children and school activities but postcards can also bring a lot of joy to places like elderly centers and retirement homes. Organizing a small postcard-writing or postcard-making workshop can be a nice, low-intensity activity for seniors, giving them the chance to do some crafts, share memories and connect with loved ones.

If you don’t work in such a place but know of one nearby, you can still brighten someone’s day by writing a few postcards to residents on October 1st! We really encourage you to suprise the seniors with a few nice postcards, sharing some stories and well wishes — we’re sure it’ll make their day!

Whether it’s a big library or a nursing home, postcards have the power to create connections everywhere. So why not make World Postcard Day an excuse to spread a little more kindness in the world?

And as always, we’d love to see what you come up with — so please share your plans and photos with the community. 😍 Besides sending some postcards on Postcrossing, who will you be writing to on World Postcard Day?

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!

The year’s flying by, but for now the summery weather is still with us here in the UK, and I’m looking forward to a few more sunny bike rides before I have to figure out where my jacket went and start thinking about warm gloves! So while I’m still holding onto summer, I’ve picked a prompt that seems appropriate:

I actually find it hard to pick favourites most of the time—and I have a solid runner up I really must mention—but my favourite song of the last few years always makes me think of summer: it’s Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer’s “Tanglewood Tree”. It always brings up such pictures in my head: “Young lovers in the tall grass with their hearts open wide / When the red summer poppies bloom…” (You can check out the full lyrics here.)

But in justice to another favourite, let me put in a word for the Cowboy Junkies’ “Crescent Moon” (lyrics), which I really like to sing along to: “Raise your eyes to a moonless sky / And try to wish upon a rising star…”

There are dozens of other songs I could mention (especially old favourites), if I had the space and time and didn’t think it’d get boring, but these two are ones I came across rather randomly, which stuck with me and to me for the last few years. So it seems like an excellent theme for something to write on your postcards this month—there should be plenty to say for a lot of us, especially if you’re as indecisive as I am about what your favourite might be! Feel free to use that as a nudge if you’re stumped, or tell us all about your favourite songs in the comments here!