The full snail mail club subscription experience

Some don’t understand the terms “snail mail”, “snail mail club” or “snail mail club subscription”. No, it’s not a slimy snail trailing over an envelope, or a club for lovers of snails. Snail mail is getting letters through the post, the old-fashioned way. They don’t appear instantly in your in-box. They take their time, sometimes crossing oceans, and pass through many hands before landing in your letterbox.

A snail mail club subscription, in the plainest terms, is when you sign up to a club and you join to receive real post, normally in the form of a letter, with sometimes a few more goodies, through your letterbox, on a schedule, month after month. That much you could ask anyone, or anything, and get the same answer. What’s harder to explain, and what nobody tells you until you’ve joined one yourself, is what it does to the shape of your month.

Joining a snail mail club gives you a sense of belonging. It’s a club where you know you will get what is promised. Where you can enjoy the anticipation of waiting. Like waiting for Christmas to open gifts, except, with a snail mail club subscription, every month could be Christmas.

It’s where you can collect ephemera that, in our case is Mediterranean or Sicilian-themed. What we send out is very collectable. Especially our stickers. We are very excited about these, because they are unique and they have been created especially for us. We love them, and we can’t wait to share them with you.

If you love the novelty of postage stamps, which are sadly becoming a rarity these days and therefore now very collectible, we also send out one Italian stamp per envelope, per month. It’s not mentioned anywhere else on our website, but from time to time, we slip in something in addition to what you expect. This month it may be a stamp, the next month another stamp, or something entirely different. That’s the joy of joining our Letters from Sicily snail mail club subscription.

The gap after your snail mail subscription sign-up

There is a stretch of days, right after you sign up, where nothing happens at all. You’ve paid, you’ve given your address, and now you wait, in the way you wait for very little else in your life anymore. Not the productive kind of waiting, where you’re refreshing a tracking number. Just waiting. It sits at the back of your mind, low and pleasant, the way a good thing does when you know it’s coming but not exactly when. There is a low level of excitement quietly humming of pure anticipation. When will it arrive? Will I be pleased with the contents?

Dispatch day, somewhere out of sight

Then a date arrives when the letter and its contents leave us and something shifts, even though you can’t see any of it happening. That’s because this side we are excited. We are grateful to all our subscribers who have entrusted us to provide a quality service, but also we have spent weeks sourcing those little extra things to slip into your envelope that we hope you will genuinely enjoy.

Your letter is sealed, addressed, and handed over, and from that point it belongs to no one. Not to us, who wrote it. Not yet to you. It’s simply in transit, somewhere between a very small post office on the southern coast of Sicily that looks like it used to be someone’s house – I’ll have to include a photo of that one day! – and a mailbox that might be an ocean away, and there is nothing either of us can do to hurry it along.

The new habit of checking

This is the part nobody warns you about. You start checking the mailbox differently. Not the reflexive glance on your way past, but a small hope that it will arrive soon, most days disappointed, until the one day it isn’t. People who’ve never had a subscription like this find it strange when you describe it. People who have, understand completely. I think the anticipation is just as rewarding as the final arrival.

When it doesn’t come on time

It’s only fair to say this plainly: the post is not always punctual, and Italy’s is no exception. Letters sent within Italy itself, over distances you could drive in an afternoon, have been known to take weeks rather than days. For reasons no one can fully account for. International post can be just as unpredictable.

There will be months when your letter arrives exactly when you expect it, and months when the date comes and goes and your mailbox holds only the usual disappointments; a bill, a flyer, nothing with your name on it in ink. That gap is real, and it can be genuinely deflating when you’ve been looking forward to it.

We package and post every letter as early and as carefully as we can, precisely because so much of the journey afterward is out of our hands. What we can promise is that it is coming. We can’t always promise exactly when. However, this is snail mail after all!

The weight of it, before you’ve even opened it

And then, on some ordinary day you’d stopped quite expecting it, there it is. You’ll know it before you’ve properly looked as the shape of the envelope is different, heavier than a bill, and there’s a particular pleasure in simply holding it for a moment before breaking the seal. The wax cracks. The ribbon comes loose. Whatever is inside, your letter, and depending on your tier, perhaps a trinket, a taste of something, a small paper token of the month, you already knew roughly what to expect. You didn’t know exactly. That gap between roughly and exactly is where all the pleasure lives.

What stays afterwards?

The letter gets read, certainly, sometimes twice. But it’s the smaller things that we include that last the longest. Those stickers that find their way into journals, along with the other bits of ephemera that we send you. Those photographs that make you dream of taking that trip to Sicily that you always promised yourself, or the recipes that you can now make and at least have a small Sicilian experience from your kitchens.

None of it is large but all of it adds up, over a year, to something a screen has never quite managed to give you. Something tangible. Something you can use in your junk journals and diaries. Something you can touch, smell, use and enjoy.

What a snail mail club subscription brings is a connection to someone you have never met, but somehow you come to know well, as each month they tell you a little more about their life living on a Mediterranean island thousands of miles away.

And please feel free to write back to me. I may not have time to answer each and everyone I receive, but I definitely will read them and answer, when I can.

Would you like to try our snail mail club subscription?

If any of this sounds like the kind of small monthly ritual you’d like in your life where you want physical letters, and enjoy making personal connections with a sense of belonging, join our entry-level snail mail subscription club; Just the Letter starting at $9.99 /€ 8.60 is the simplest place to start, or you can compare the tiers to see which one suits you.

Everything we include has a Sicilian or Mediterranean theme. If you would like to get a letter of your own, come and join us.