Message in a bottle

With e-mailing, texting, tweeting, posting to Facebook, Instagramming, blogging, Skyping, and all the other electronic methods of getting in touch with friends and family, it's easy to forget the joy of opening a physical mailbox to find a piece of actual, real mail.

I've been thinking about a friend who needs a pocket of joy in her life.  She's going through one of those times when life moves from drizzling to thunderstorms to rain with few bright spots among the clouds.  So when I stumbled across Happy Mail, I thought immediately of sending her a bit of happy!

What fun!  I felt like such a sneaky little Happy Elf, assembling this gift.  I started with a Gatorade bottle, leftover from my Bayou to Bay adventure.  Next, I headed to a dollar store where I found the lovely rainbow arrow-shaped sticky tabs.  Aren't they cheerful?  I picked them up because I couldn't resist their rainbow beauty, but I was really hoping to find some fun, unique sprinkles to send.  This particular friend is an avid baker with a sizable (somewhat secret) stash of sprinkles of all sorts.  Sadly, at the cooks' store, the sprinkles were pretty typical fare--nothing she wouldn't already have in her vast collection.  However, I did find food coloring markers.  These would go well with my rainbow theme! 

To round out the gift, I added a heart-shaped rainbow card (rolled up to fit into the bottle) and some sunshine-shaped confetti.  At the last moment, I found a little heart-shaped rainbow eraser.  Perfect!

Despite some negative naysayers ("I don't know if you can do that . . . I'm worried you might be wasting your money." "Maybe you should just put it in a box." "They [postal employees] may just throw it away."), I screwed the lid on tightly, added postage, and (after some consideration about which post office might have the most funky-mail friendly postal employees) popped the bottle into mail.  Hee, hee! 

Three days later, I received a phone message.  "Hello!  I got the very very very cutest amazing little bottle of love today!  . . . When I opened the mailbox, it was there and I went 'What is that?!'  It was awesome!  I wish you could have seen my face.   . . . I loved every single thing." 

It worked!  Now I want to send more!  Who should be the next recipient of Happy Mail?  I am really wishing I had saved (instead of recycled) all those Gatorade bottles we accumulate when we're out in the heat, digging!

What kind of happiness will you mail?  Give it a try!  Check out the details on sending Happy Mail, write a real letter, maybe do a little mail art, and send some love to someone's mailbox!