Postcrossing Blog

The World Postcard Day (aka, the “postcardiest” day of the year) is next week already, but there’s still a little bit of time to get ready to celebrate the best day of the year! October 1st is the perfect day to spread smiles in the form of postcards, and if you need some inspiration, we do have a few tips to help you get ready and enjoy the day.

Naturally, the best activity for World Postcard Day is to send postcards, so you should make sure you have a nice little stash of both postcards and stamps. Is your favorite pen ready and writing smoothly? And have you made sure your address book is up-to-date? Now is a good time to check!

If you’re like us, you would like to make a list of whom you’re planning to send a postcard to. Think about the friends or relatives you treasure, your nice neighbors, the teachers that stoked your curiosity… Maybe you want to go over the contacts on your phone, and think of the people you haven’t seen in a while and who you could surprise with a postcard! Or perhaps there are local institutions that could use some cheering, like the firefighters in your area who faced fires or floods this year… If you have other good suggestions, write them down in the comments — we’d love to hear who you’ll be sending your postcards to.

By the way, remember last year, when Postcrossing’s website had the hiccups on World Postcard Day when everyone tried to send lots of postcards at the same time…? 😅 The project was not made for these peaks of activity, and it has trouble finding recipients when soooo many people are trying to send postcards at the same time. There are a couple of things you can do to help, though! First, if your account is currently set to inactive, consider setting it to active on the day to give the algorithm a few more addresses to chose from. And secondly, remember that in order to receive the World Postcard Day badge on your profile, you only need one postcard sent on October 1st to arrive to its destination… so if you notice the website is getting a little sluggish and you’ve already sent a handful of postcards, say a little prayer for the database and maybe write a postcard to a friend or relative instead. They’ll be happy you’re thinking of them on this special day, and the team here will be thankful you’re thinking of us too!

By the way, if you have little cousins or nephews, or maybe small children in your street or building, consider gathering them around for a mini-workshop on how to write their first postcard! You can all talk about how mail works, decorate and write postcards, and then take a little stroll to the mailbox together. Imagine how happy will they be when the postcards arrive! If you do this, please take pictures to share with us, award yourself five points and then pat yourself on the back with pride — you’re helping to raise a new generation of postcard writers! :)

This year, the World Postcard Day lands on a Saturday, which is brilliant as many of us have more free time on the weekends. I know many postcrossers are planning to attend local meetups (and there are quite a few taking place!), and I’m sure it’ll be special to celebrate this day with like-minded folks who love postcards as much as we do. 😊 There are also other events taking place, like museum workshops and special cancellation marks — check the World Postcard Day events page for the full list.

If you’re a little antsy to start celebrating the day and have a few postcards to spare, why not sending a one or two to your local media outlets, to let them know the World Postcard Day is coming on October 1st? Maybe they’ll pick up on the news, and mention the day on an article or video piece… wouldn’t that be brilliant?

And last but not least, remember that the “traditional” meal for the World Postcard Day (as suggested by postcrosser Bonnie Jeanne aka postmuse) is ravioli, because they look like small postage stamps!

We hope you have a lovely World Postcard Day next week… and until then, don’t forget to do some wrist exercises to build up strength! 💪

Aaaaaand we have a winner! 🎉

Over the past couple of months, 174 designs were submitted to the World Postcard Day design contest and so the job of choosing just one was once more a tough challenge. They were so many great entries!

This year, the team of judges was composed of us at Postcrossing, Frank Roche from The Postcardist Podcast, Graham Beck from Exploring Stamps, Perrine Bisson from the Musée de La Poste and Will Hansen, curator of Americana at the Newberry Library (who are the custodians of the Curt Teich Postcard Archives). This stellar team took the time to enjoy and ponder all the designs, and after much admiring and careful consideration, a winner has emerged.

So, without further ado, let me introduce to you the postcard that will represent the 2022 edition of the World Postcard Day! It was created by French animation student and postcrosser Pauline Chrétien (aka paulinectart):

Here is what she wrote about this lovely design:

Postcards can deliver a little bit of hope and kindness to people who need it, and to show our support to every victim of conflict on earth.
That is why I chose to represent world peace through postcards, delivered by doves, this bird that symbolizes peace around the world.

Congratulations Pauline! We love the style and the message it conveys — of peace being delivered to all these different mailboxes!

If you’d like to print this postcard on your local printing shop or through an online service (like Vistaprint or Moo), the files are available for download on the World Postcard Day page. If you use it or receive it, we encourage you to share it online with the hashtag #WorldPostcardDay on your favorite social media platform! We’d love to see how far and wide this lovely postcard travels, and especially look forward to seeing pictures of it next to different mailboxes around the world! 📮

Now is the time to make plans for October 1st, to celebrate this special day! There are some events already on the calendar and more will be announced in the coming weeks, but you can choose how you participate and make something unique. It can be as simple and as nice as sending postcards to family, friends, co-workers, inspiring teachers or neighbors! But you can also choose to use postcards in a classroom if you’re an educator, help your young family members send their first postcards, or help your local library or museum do something special to mark the day… Check out this page for some tips! And don’t forget to share your plans with us in the comments below or on this forum topic, so we can spread the word and inspire each other.

And naturally, the World Postcard Day badge will be awarded once more to those who send at least one postcard in Postcrossing on October 1st. Make sure to save some slots until then, so you can request a few postcards on the day and earn the special badge once more!

Here we go again!

The calendar tells us it’s less than 4 months until World Postcard Day, so it’s time to start preparing for the big day. First things first: the design contest to choose this year’s representative postcard is now officially open!

The theme of 2022's contest is the topic that has inevitably been on everyone’s mind: World Peace. It’s in periods of conflict that we truly understand how important peace is — without it, nothing else is achievable. Postcards can be tiny ambassadors for peace, delivering messages of hope, connecting people across borders and promoting more awareness about the world and its cultures.

We hope this theme inspires many of you to pick up your drawing tools and create something beautiful for this year’s postcard, which will later be shared and sent to all over the world.

Before you do so, please make sure to read the rules carefully. You can submit your designs (in digital form only) until July 15 on the contest page, and we’ll announce the winner until August 15.

And, as usual, there are some prizes! Besides the guaranteed warm fuzzy feeling of having your design be the one to represent the World Postcard Day, we’re also giving away one fantastic Wacom Intuos drawing tablet for the first prize, and a trilogy of Austin Kleon books for the second and third prizes. We’re big fans of Wacom’s versatile drawing tablets, as well as Austin’s pragmatic and inspirational advice for artists (which really applies to everyone). All winners will also receive a Pantone postcard box, to round things up. YAY! 🎉

Even if you’re not brilliant at design, we hope you’ll help us spread the word about the contest and poke your creative friends to participate… especially if they are aspiring artists and could use a little push to put their art out there. 😊 We can’t wait to see how everyone will interpret this year’s theme!

Has it really been a week? It feels like we’re still in a strange daze, dreaming of postcards, stamps and cancellation marks…

Anyway, it was a blast! It felt like the second World Postcard Day was bigger than the first edition, which is awesome — there were a lot more events, but also more postcards being sent in Postcrossing and more buzz on social media all throughout the day as well. The excitement was palpable, and it seemed like everywhere we looked, a celebration was taking place!

Take Jersey Post, for instance, who set up a display at their main post office where people could write words of wisdom in postcards, to share with others. Sage advice has been pouring in from post office visitors, and it’s really heart-warming to see! A few other postal services joined in the day, issuing a number of special cancellation marks and even some postcards, and there were quite a few events taking place in museums too, like the popular “From Me to You” workshop at the London’s Postal Museum’s café, and events for children in Slovenia and Finland.

Where possible and safe, meetups took place to celebrate the day, in places like Mumbai, Lisbon, Taipei or Bonn! If you were in a meeting, please upload some photos to its forum topic – so few people do these days, but we’d love to see your happy faces and your piles of postcards too.

In London, at Stampex (the biggest stamp collector’s fair in Europe), postcrossers got the chance to listen to a couple of interesting talks about postcards, peruse the stands, and enjoy sending postcards from the show. A total of 3000 World Postcard Day postcards were distributed to visitors this year, so everyone could send a postcard to celebrate the day!

This year, we were happy to see more libraries join in as well, with pop-up postcard writing stations inviting visitors to mail a postcard! A few of these were set up by postcrossers, who donated unwritten postcards to their local libraries and let them know about the World Postcard Day. That was really sweet, and it’s something we’d like to try to replicate in more places next year — wouldn’t it be cool if all libraries had a little postcard basket, encouraging visitors to grab one and mail it on the day? Libraries (and librarians) are the best!

Still, some things didn’t quite go as planned… 😅 Postcrossing’s infrastructure wasn’t made for these peaks of activity, so it struggled a bit to come up with addresses to give out on that day. You might have noticed the site was a little slow or unresponsive at times. Paulo kept an eye on the servers, made some tweaks here and there and slowly things improved towards the second half of the day. We hope to be better prepared for this avalanche next year.

That said, a lot of you have already started seeing the badges on your profiles as your October 1st postcards make their way to their destinations, and I’m sure you’re curious to know how many postcards were sent on that day, right? During October 1st in the UTC timezone, 70,381 postcards were sent through Postcrossing, and that number increases to 75,659 if you count with postcards requested on October 1st in other timezones as well. Hurray! This is about four times more than any other day of the year, so we are super impressed with everyone’s energy and readiness to write a few extra postcards! I bet you looked a bit like us in the gif below…

We’d like to think that these are just a small percentage of postcards sent on World Postcard Day though — hopefully a lot of postcards also went out to friends, family members and other people who we treasure and appreciate.

We hope you all had a wonderful World Postcard Day, surrounded by postcards and the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing you’re making other people happy! Thank you for enthusiastically embracing this idea as a community and for making this idea come true, pushing it forward and making the world a better place, one postcard at a time. 💛

PS – Today is World Post Day! UN’s Secretary-General António Guterres said: "On World Post Day, we recognize the invaluable contributions of postal workers to our societies and economies. The vast postal network – involving millions of workers moving billions of pieces of mail through hundreds of thousands of post offices – is woven into our societies, connecting communities the world over. ” It is decidedly so, and we are thankful for all of their hard work that brings us closer together through the mail.

After months and months of waiting, it’s finally World Postcard Daaaay!! 🥳

Do you feel the excitement in the air too? If you sit still and listen very very closely, you might be able to hear the busy scribblings of thousands of pens gliding across these little pieces of paper… And have you tried licking a stamp today? They somehow taste better than in any other day of the year… it’s like magic!

World Postcard Day is the day we celebrate the joy that postcards bring, by flooding mailboxes all over the world with happy mail. We cannot but smile imagining the puzzled look of postal workers everywhere, when they notice the avalanche of postcards, making its way through their sorting machines!

For those who are just joining the celebrations for the first time this year, we invite you to learn a bit more about the history of postcards. Did you know this is the day in which they celebrate their 152^nd anniversary? Yup! Postcards have been around since 1869, when Dr. Emanuel Herrmann suggested that a practical and cheaper alternative to letters should be implemented for shorter, more efficient communications. His recommendations impressed the Austro-Hungarian Post, who put them to practice on October 1st 1869, resulting in the Correspondenz-Karte… and the rest is history!

Postal operators, museums, philatelic associations, charities, libraries and postcard enthusiasts in different countries have all put together a number of events to celebrate the day, so do make sure to check them out too.

Oh, I forgot to mention this on the last post! The best meal for the World Postcard Day (as suggested by Bonnie Jeanne’s aka postmuse last year) is ravioli, because they look like little postage stamps! So, we challenge you to make or grab some on your way home — it’ll be our shared World Postcard Day tradition, part of the day’s lore.

Wherever you are, however you wish to celebrate, we hope you have a brilliant World Postcard Day… and we’ll see you on your mailbox! 😊