Postcrossing Blog

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!

HURRAAAAAAAAAY!!! We’ve been waiting a looooong time to share this news: the United States Postal Service is issuing some shiny new Postcrossing stamps! Woohoo!

It’s been a long road to get here: many of you have written to the USPS Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee over the years to ask for a Postcrossing stamp, and we’ve also been working with USPS behind the scenes for quite a while to make this happen. It’s finally happening, and what a huge honor it is for the community. A proper celebration of the joy, generosity, and curiosity that postcrossers put into the world every day.

Anyway, let’s talk about the stamps themselves… because: TRIANGLES! 😍

The new Postcrossing stamps are triangular, which is a pretty rare format for USPS. And yes — that means you can place one right on the corner of a postcard for an especially cool look. Since there are four different stamps to choose from, you won’t always be sending (or receiving) the same ones. These are global forever stamps, which means they are the international postcard (or letter) rate, and you need one single stamp to send a postcard abroad.

Visually, they’re a lot of fun: bold colors and playful scenes with lots of tiny details. They were designed by Antonio Alcalá and illustrated by Jackson Gibbs, and the result is energetic, bright, and unmistakably Postcrossing.

The launch day is May 26, 2026, and there will be a commemorative ceremony at the the Boston 2026 World Expo — and everyone’s invited! Even better: there will be Postcrossing meetups every day of the show (which is free!), so bring postcards, say hi, and let’s celebrate together. No worries if you can’t make it to Boston — like any other USPS stamps, these will be available online and at post offices around the country.

We’ll share more details (including meetup info and other products that will be available along with the stamps) as we get closer to the date. But for now, we’re just going to sit here grinning at these gorgeous triangles for a while.

USA postcrossers: are you ready? And everyone else: who’s hoping to receive one of these on a postcard very soon?

Today we have a special guest post from Dawn (aka DJMinNL), a postcrosser who lives in the Netherlands but was born in Scotland. She recently wrote to us with a wonderfully quirky piece of postal history: the time when Scottish pillar boxes became the unlikely stars of a national “stooshie”. If you’ve ever looked twice at the lettering or symbols on a postbox, you’re going to enjoy this one!

The Scottish Pillar Box War was one of those odd moments in postal history when something as ordinary as a post box ended up at the centre of a national debate. Despite its dramatic name, it was never a real “war.” It was more of a stooshie (a good Scots word for an uproar) involving red pillar boxes, royal lettering, and a question of historical pride.

The story began in 1952 when Elizabeth II became queen. When she chose “Elizabeth II” as her regnal number, it seemed perfectly logical in England: she was the second monarch with that name after Elizabeth I, who ruled from 1558 to 1603. But there was a small historical wrinkle. Elizabeth I ruled England and Ireland before the crowns of England and Scotland were united in 1603. Scotland, therefore, had never had a Queen Elizabeth I. For some Scots, calling the new monarch “Elizabeth II” felt like England’s numbering system was imposed on them despite the historical facts.

Now, constitutional debates don’t usually involve everyday street furniture. However, the new red pillar boxes operated by the Royal Mail carried the royal cypher “E II R” short for Elizabeth II Regina (“Regina” meaning queen in Latin). Suddenly, those elegant raised letters on brand-new boxes became a visible reminder of the disputed “II.”

For a small number of annoyed Scots, the solution was simple: remove the “II.” Some pillar boxes had the number scratched out or hammered flat. Others were painted over. A few suffered more dramatic treatment—one or two were even damaged with small explosives. These incidents were rare but colourful enough to attract newspaper headlines, and the whole episode soon picked up its memorable nickname: the “Scottish Pillar Box War.”

Most of the activity took place between 1952 and 1953, particularly in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The “attacks” were usually carried out quietly at night by individuals or small groups rather than crowds. One pillar box in Edinburgh became particularly notorious, it was repeatedly defaced by tar, paint, and a hammer before finally being blown to pieces less than three months after it was installed.

From a postal perspective, the damage was inconvenient but hardly catastrophic. Still, it was enough to persuade authorities that perhaps a small design adjustment would make life easier for everyone.

A practical compromise soon followed. Instead of displaying the queen’s cypher, new pillar boxes installed in Scotland would simply show the Crown of Scotland. The change neatly avoided the disputed numbering while keeping a royal symbol on the box. After that, the vandalism quickly faded and the pillar boxes quietly returned to doing what they do best—collecting letters.

Interestingly, the design choice stuck. Even today, the Scottish pillar boxes continue to display the Scottish crown rather than a monarch’s cypher. When Charles III came to the throne in 2023, it was announced that Scottish boxes would keep the crown rather than adopt the new “C III R” lettering.

This episode is a reminder that post boxes are more than just practical street furniture. Their designs, ciphers, and symbols can reflect politics, identity, and sometimes a surprising amount of local feeling, for example, when Ireland gained its independence they painted the old red post boxes green.

And it raises an interesting question for Postcrossers: has there ever been similar controversies about post boxes or postal symbols in your country?

For anyone curious, the uproar even inspired a song. The lyrics to “Sky-High Joe”—a humorous take on the whole affair—can still be found online.

A fitting legacy for a dispute where, for a brief moment, the humble pillar box found itself at the centre of national attention.