#58: Voting and deep cuts from the archives

Depression-era holiday cards and then some

Hi, winter babes!

Are you eating a lot of cookies? Are you making plans for 2025 with color-coded lists? Are you checked out of 2024 already and playing video games in your pajamas with a glass of wine at noon? I’m kind of doing all three at once, most of the time clad in my hideous Christmas sweater (it’s really bad).

The 20th of the month always brings a short post for ya, but starting this month, I’m offering something extra! Today I’ll

💌 tell y’all how voting works,

💌 drop some juicy historical research from the archives,

💌 and share this month’s poll to vote on the required action and word for our monthly microfiction, choose 2025’s first mail topic, AND suggest future themes!

“Scootin’ into Christmas.” A ghastly and incredible sweater I bust out every single December 1st.

🗳 Here’s how voting works.

Every month, y’all vote on the following month’s topic. Whatever historical snail mail topic wins the vote, I research it into the ground and tell you everything I learned about on the 10th of that month.

Postcard Club members and my Patreon crew also vote on a required word and action that must appear in a piece of microfiction I write that’s thematically relevant to the month’s topic.

Once voting closes on the 28th, I’ll write you a story short enough to fit on a postcard in just 48 hours, using the prompts you picked.

This month’s story will be all about the holidays! If you want a fix of historical holiday mail to get in the spirit, I got you covered:

Once my story’s out in the world for you, it’s your turn. Write your own microfiction that follows the prompts, then post it in the comments, email it to me, or give it to a man in a red suit and hope he’s Santa.

Voting is fun! Easy! And signing up gives you artwork that’s cool enough to hang in your home:

If you’re feeling ~vote curious~, dip your toes in and unlock your free post.

You can also join my Patreon for as low as $2 a month:

But first, I dug up some vintage holiday cards for y’all that celebrate the ways we got festive, even during the hard times.

🕎 Great Depression Christmas, WWII Hanukkah - we still gotta celebrate, baby!

Right now it seems like the US is facing some lean times. Almost everyone I know is struggling, even folks who haven’t before encountered much financial hardship. (If you disagree, let me know, but from my view over here in France it looks rough).

But the country’s no stranger to hardship. About a hundred years ago, the US was in the midst of the crisis plaguing much of the world: the Great Depression. And the thing about calendars, is they keep ticking forward whether you want them to or not. Time doesn’t give a shit if you’re poor, and Christmas is still gonna come to kick your ass and demand holiday cheer no matter what your wallet says.

In the throes of the Great Depression, Christmas came each year whether folks were read or not. And instead of letting it bog them down, folks got creative. In 1933, one family was determined to spread holiday cheer - even if it meant drawing stick figures onto a holiday card made from paper bags. On December 19th, 1933, the Pinero family paid one and a half cents for a stamp to send this card in the mail to their loved ones across the country: