Postcrossing Blog

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!

Friends… it was a grand party, wasn’t it? 🎉 On World Postcard Day last week, postcards were written, friends were met, and a bit all around the world, the joy of knowing we’re sharing a happy day with so many people like us was just contagious. So much buzzing energy, both online and offline… it was the best World Postcard Day yet! There’s too much to cover, so here’s a quick highlight of a few things that took place on that magical day.

First off, schools! Marjorie (aka Marjie) from Rainbows Penpal Club was busy connecting together 552 children in 17 schools and 9 different countries so that they could all exchange postcards! On the day itself, she even had time to run events on a few different libraries — how cool is that? Other schools in the UK also joined in the day, and we are so, so proud of all these teachers and educators who are raising a new generation of postcard writers!

Mailart workshops and exhibitions took place in different countries as well (like the ones in Bangalore, or in Tampere), and there were special postmarks in Portugal and Malta, at least. Besides making a handstamp available for the day, Malta Postal Museum also created a unique postcard to celebrate the World Postcard Day — as did the Faroe Post!

We cannot possibly write about all the Postcrossing meetups that took place on the day… but it warms our heart to know people got together, from Indonesia to Spain, China to the USA, India, UK or Portugal… Have a peek at the events list — there were over 100 of them!

Allow us to highlight just a couple. For instance, postcrossers and Correos de Mexico organized a postcard-making workshop to celebrate the day. It took place at the beautiful Palacio Postal (which the Little Mail Carriers visited before) and had lots of participants!

In Tallinn, a big meetup took place to celebrate both the World Postcard Day and the new Postcrossing stamp that Estonia launched on that day! A lot of the participants travelled to this meeting from Finland by boat with the Finnish Postcrossing Friends Association, who organized the meetup and took the photo on the left. Illustrators, designers and publishers were also invited to participate.

Some postcrossers cooked ravioli (remember that they are shaped like postage stamps?) on the day, and Adrienne (aka adriennefriend) and her partner made this delicious looking vegan ravioli from scratch. The filling is made of tofu-cashew cheese and fresh herbs, and even the sauce was homemade! We didn’t have much time on our hands that day, so we stuck with stamp-shaped cookies, which were also delicious.

The day happened to land on a Saturday, which made it perfect for #postboxsaturday — and so many of you joined in and posted photos of postcards alongside your country’s postboxes on social media! 😍 We loved seeing them, in all their diverse and colorful glory!

Some postcrossers have already started seeing the updated badges on your profile pages, as the postcards sent on the day start to arrive to their destinations. Over 90,000 of them were sent in the timespan that counts as World Postcard Day (in all timezones), which is massive… about 7 times more than an average day in Postcrossing. We’re relieved that the website was more or less stable throughout the whole day, as it really was not made for this kind of peaks. But everything was fine in the end! 😊 We hope these are just a few of the postcards sent on that day though, and that many more have been sent out to your friends, family, and others out there. The world’s mailboxes should be very happy indeed.

Thank you everyone, for making this such a wonderful day. It’s definitely been the highlight of the year for us, and we hope you had a nice day as well!

By the way, today is World Post Day — the day postal services are celebrated around the world, and also the anniversary of the Universal Postal Union. On the occasion, the secretary general of the United Nations, Mr. António Guterres, said:

“The theme of this year’s World Post Day – “Post for Planet” – recognizes the many ways in which postal services are finding cleaner, greener means to reach our doorsteps day in, day out. “Post for Planet” is also a call to action for the postal sector to use its position as a connector between governments, businesses, and people to take a leading role in our fight against climate change.”