I’ve been thinking a lot about letter writing this past year, a year in which we are all more or less distanced from one another. I was going through a list of the British Kate Greenaway Medal books recently and unearthed a couple of winners by Allan and Janet Ahlberg that I remember fondly from the 1970s and 1980s.
The Kate Greenaway Medal is awarded yearly for “distinguished illustration in a book for children,” and Each Peach Pear Plum and The Jolly Postman Christmas Letters were family favorites. These were books that my children pored over; the former because it was a charming “I Spy” with nursery rhyme characters hiding in the countryside scenes, and the latter for its happy interactive elements as the postman delivers letters and gifts during the Christmas season to a variety of familiar storybook friends. That book, and its predecessor, The Jolly Postman or Other People’s Letters, carry tiny envelopes with handwritten letters within, to be opened and explored.
Each Peach Pear Plum
Each Peach Pear Plum is a rhyming picture book based on familiar characters from other stories. The phrase invites your child in:
“In this book, with your little eye, take a look and play ‘I spy’”
Then each game begins with:
“Each peach pear plum, I spy Tom Thumb”
Very young children enjoy the rhymes and pictures, though they may not yet be familiar with every character – a wonderful reason in itself to read fairy tales and nursery rhymes from an early age. Hiding on the pages are Cinderella, Mother Hubbard, the Wicked Witch, the Three Bears, Baby Bunting, Bo Peep, Jack and Jill, Robin Hood, ending with Plum Pie, and a picnic with Everyone! This is a wonderful book for a baby gift.
The Jolly Postman or Other People’s Letters
The Jolly Postman or Other Peoples Letters was the next rhyming Ahlberg book that we read over and over and wore out. It too uses characters from other stories and assumes some familiarity with a common nursery and fairy tales.
The postman on his bicycle delivers letters to the neighborhood: a letter of apology from Goldilocks to the Three Bears, a letter of thanks from Jack to the Giant in the Beanstalk for the golden goose, a threatening solicitor’s letter to the Big Bad Wolf who is occupying Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s house (“all this huffing and puffing will get you nowhere”), and others. These are all tiny handwritten letters in their own envelopes, so this is interactive hands-on fun.
The Jolly Christmas Postman
In The Jolly Christmas Postman, the Ahlberg’s pulled out all the stops. The postman delivers cards, letters, a tiny puzzle, games, and a book within a book, to characters including Tom Thumb, a gingerbread boy, the Big Bad Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood, and Mr. Humpty Dumpty in the hospital. It finishes with a visit to Santa and a ride home through the snow on his sleigh loaded with toys, and a nice teatime for the tired postman. I can imagine what fun the Ahlbergs must have had when planning out this clever book of hands-on surprises.
In these long stretches of the pandemic year, I’ve been thinking about reviving letter writing as an addition to email, phone, Zoom, and all the other tech fancy ways to communicate. Don’t get me wrong, I love my computer and iPad and smartphone, and spend quantities of quality time with them daily. But there’s something about letter writing that I’ve missed for many years now. I do love getting an email from a friend or family member, but there is added excitement when a letter from a real person arrives in the mailbox. December is a favorite month because of the holiday cards which are a last holdout of the letter-writing traditions.
Since I’ve retired, I’ve spent a part of the winter months going through old letters dating back to the 1930s for my parent’s generation, and then letters to and from me through college, travels in Europe, marriage, raising children. They stop in the early 1990s when the internet arrived. Though I’ve saved emails intermittently since then, it isn’t quite the same reading through them, a typewritten report on anonymous computer paper.
I’ll be very surprised if letter writing comes back, but we can give our children and grandchildren a taste of the olden days through these delightful books from the last century (I love saying that!)
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