The longhand letter is a time-honoured tradition that still thrills today.

My name is written carefully in small, well-formed letters across the front of a bright, white envelope. It's a handwritten letter from my 96-year-old aunt who has taken the time to sit down at a desk and write out her thoughts to me on the weather, on her new life in the retirement home and how her flowers are growing in the containers on her balcony. She's the only one in the family who still takes the time to write out four-page letters. Oh sure - I might get a handwritten note from my cousin or one of my siblings. But they are usually short and to-the-point sentences that fit into the space provided on a little card. Hasty notes.

We sometimes forget there was a time before computers and typewriters. It was a simpler time: lives weren't as busy and fractured, and letters were the primary means of communication. They invited, they thanked, they implored and they revealed. Personal letters - written by men as well as women - in some way acted as a personal journal, showing the details of the day: perhaps a passage about a trip into town, the new neighbour down the way or fears about a cold winter. Letters from loved ones were cherished for years, carefully tied in ribbon and kept in a shoebox or drawer.

In today's world of mass communication, the inherent care, thoughtfulness and attentiveness of something handwritten still holds great promise of personal connectedness - of insights into family thoughts and feelings, of a friendly invitation to tea or a decorous thank you note for dinner. Today, as we near the holiday season, many people will sit down to write out a few notes in greeting cards. This is personal communication in a world that's busy beyond words. At least - often beyond those words that take the time to be handwritten.

The Salutation

Little can compare to the history of writing by hand - an art estimated to have begun thousands of years ago, involving chiselling into mud or clay walls and even onto stone tablets. Pre-technology writing progressed from pictures to symbols and then to letters of the alphabet; people moved from awkward clay tablets to more portable media such as animal skins, papyrus and wood - and finally, paper. Today, handwriting has been replaced in large part by the easier, more efficient use of the telephone and e-mail. More efficient, perhaps, if infinitely less textured with personal flourishes.

The Body

Some of the handwritten letters from the 17th to the 20th century - now preserved on microfilm in provincial archives - demonstrate an exquisite level of penmanship. Calligraphy was a common style in personal and business communication of yesteryear; it was also commonplace for people to write words with big flourishes at the end of either a word or a sentence. A letter or a diary entry  could be a thing of great visual beauty.

Deep in the archives of Newfoundland's Memorial University are collections of letters that reveal a lot about history, culture and general society over hundreds of years. One of these collections, willed to the Centre for Newfoundland Studies at the university, is from the family of Topsail postmistress and author Florence Miller. Perhaps because she was an author and obviously loved the written word, Florence kept many of her letters, including the following from a prominent St. John's businessman who wrote to thank her for a gift:

Dear Florence
Vy many thanks for your beautiful Birthday card & Wishes and the book of essays. One of wh. I read each morning.
I hope your Christmas has been better than you hoped for and that your 1929 will have peace, joy, health and success in abundance
My Best
Sincerely
Harold Macpherson

In this case the punctuation is lax; the words are scrawled across the page in pale blue ink, lacking in neatness - but Harold was showing the courtesy of the day, as it existed in 1928. Members of the well-situated business family knew their etiquette, and they practiced it.

It's sometimes difficult to decipher centuries-old handwritten letters: words had different meanings; letter-writers - including Harold - used a writing method known as secretary style, using short forms of words; and writers formed their letters in a different way. Linda White, an archivist with the Centre for Newfoundland Studies says letter writing of long ago was very formal - different, too. The centre has many examples of something never seen today: the criss-cross letter. "What they would do is write down the front of a page and then turn the page sideways and write up across the side. When you first look at it, it looks like a mishmash. You think you can never read it…but if you stop and look, you see that you can read it easily," Linda says, adding that people used the criss-cross technique in the 19th century and earlier, and even into the 20th century.

"It's fascinating…All kinds of people would do it - even Prime Ministers. I think it was done because of a shortage of paper, or because postage was determined by weight."

Additionally, right up until after the end of the Second World War, people wrote on a piece of paper that was then folded in such a way that it formed the envelope. It was all very economical in an age when people knew the value of a penny.

But if economical, letter-writing was elaborate and elegant, too. Wax was used to seal envelopes long before adhesive envelopes were invented, but wax seals were also often used to convey identity, with initials or a family crest. Businesses had their protocols, too. Halifax law school graduate Mark Ross recalls a time not so long ago when lawyers made a point of using fountain pens to sign documents. "It was like the larger the pen, the more prestigious a lawyer you were," he says. And as with anyone over a certain age, Mark remembers the elementary school years when you dipped a fountain pen in the little jar of ink in the inkwell cut into your school desk.

"That was how we learned to write - with a fountain pen - and good penmanship meant the difference between going home and staying after school for detention," he says of his memories of school in the 1950s.

The Closing

Given our modern-day reliance on e-mail, Newfoundland's Linda White wonders if the handwritten letter is endangered - and what it might mean in terms of chronicling how we live for future generations." In another 100 years, there might not be as much from this time period, not with all the e-mail used today," she says.

But most archivists aren't too concerned about losing the details of our culture, given our rampant information-technology age.

Margaret Conrad, University of New Brunswick professor and Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies, says that archivists and historians have concerns about a scarcity of primary sources, but there are initiatives underway to address them. "The bottom line is that with every communications revolution, the first generation of knowledge is often lost - early printed books, early radio programs, early TV programs, etc," Margaret says.

One of the latest Internet trends is to create individual weblogs, or "blogs," for short. Simplistically, these are website diaries people set up to journal their lives. It's the biggest movement towards web archiving yet.

Still, let's hope the art of the languorous, longhand letter is not a thing of the past. For if it is our mailboxes are less friendly, less warm and certainly less exciting. And think twice before throwing away that precious handwritten letter. Consider it your hand reaching out across time and into the future - giving someone a snapshot of life at the beginning of the second millennium.

The Signature

Linda White says that even after all these years of handling centuries-old documents, she is still thrilled when something old crosses her desk. "It's pretty exciting," she says. "You get to learn a bit about the person and the times."

As the holiday season nears and I prepare to send out this year's cards, I will take some time to jot a few more lines in each of them. I like the feel of a really good pen in my hand and the luxurious smoothness with which it moves on the paper, like a figure skater gliding across ice. I will embellish my writing with a slight artistic flair that's attractive, yet not too ostentatious. It's something different I can do in the spirit of the season - a little extra attentiveness for some special people.

And who knows, I might even get my thank you cards out before the snow melts, this year.