Handwritten Love
On Christmas cards and handwriting. A Thought for the Day for BBC Radio 4. (Listen here.)
Here’s an old one I recognise. From a pen held in a shaky hand at the end of a long life. The last Christmas card from my mum.
Here’s one this week from a family I’d been wondering about — that’s good to read, they’re doing ok after all.
This one needs deciphering — like most of us the author is out of practice at holding a pen.
December is the month when the greetings card brings handwriting back from the dead. The hundreds of millions of cards that we exchange may include the bland and box-ticking, but many will be thoughtful, considered and personalized.
In the twenty years since digital communications overwhelmed us with email and text, the handwritten letter has become a rarity.
But for all its efficiency an electronic message will not hold the warmth and personality of the sender.
In some way the handwriter becomes incarnate in her letter — not least because she has taken so much longer over it. Finding paper and pen, thinking the thought before writing, the envelope, the stamp, the delay between postbox and letterbox.
I’ve written five cards so far — in the time that I could have sent a dozen emails. The pen slows you into considering the recipient and your relationship.
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When my friend became unwell she said that while every message was welcome, it was the handwritten cards and letters that meant the most.
And the writing may be as good for us as the reading.
Research in the European Medical Journal finds handwriting — unlike typing — activates wider neural networks linked to memory and cognition. The tactile kinaesthetics boost creativity.
In one of this year’s most moving novels, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, ageing protagonist Sybil van Antwerp, sits down most mornings to write a letter.
To old friends, her distant children or famous authors. The letters help her understand her own difficult life and explain herself to others.
Even if, as she writes ‘they will remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion.’
Traditional Christmas card images — the light in the dark sky, the angelic choir, the animals in the stable — point to the signature motif of the Christmas story.
The invisible becoming visible, the intangible becoming physical.
Love, handwritten, in the life of a small child.
‘The word became flesh and dwelt among us…’ as one ancient writer wrote, on one ancient parchment.
Perhaps in the future those who follow us will regard handwritten letters as we now regard ancient cave wall drawings.
Baffling, mysterious, endearing - but connecting us through generations, reaching out to us, across time.
