White Snail gifts

Like many others, I’m not generally very good at keeping in touch with others not in my vicinity. I’ve never been much of a phone talker or e-mailer since I can rarely think of anything interesting but concise to say (as you may have noticed if you’ve been reading my blog). I do like writing letters sometimes since it’s easier to say nothing in a letter and still convey ideas, but I’m usually too lazy to sit down and write anything.

Years ago, I stumbled on a very simple way to keep in touch with old friends that requires little thought or effort. I call it the White Snail gift. The premise can be compared to White Elephant parties, where everyone brings and exchanges gag gifts. The strategy of the White Snail is that, instead of exchanging gifts, you simply mail the gags through the post office (snail mail, get it?).

I believe the White Snail gift is best executed in the following manner: Whenever you come across or are given something that’s not quite trash but that you don’t have any use for, put it into an envelope or box and mail it off to someone you haven’t heard from in awhile. Don’t bother trying to write an explanation because then it’ll be like writing a letter and you’ll just put the whole thing off and the object will never get sent. I prefer to single one person out and just continuously send them crap for a year or so. I probably get something sent about every other month. It’s not really an idea worth wasting money on, so I try to stick to small, light objects. One great thing about the White Snail is you start looking for weird stuff to send.

The first thing you must realize about White Snail gifts is that you should never expect any reciprocation. In fact, you should never expect to find out whether or not they actually received the gift at all. At first I didn’t write my return address on the gifts, since I thought it was funny to have them speculate who it was from, assuming the post office stamp should be enough of a clue; but then I got curious about whether the gift had been received. Besides, putting my return address on the package lets the recipient know I’m thinking of them, and not what could simply be some random stalker. A gag gift exchange would be fun, but if your friends are like mine it would kill the idea in its tracks, since you’d send something off and never hear from them again.

I stumbled across this idea quite by accident. In the late 90’s I lived in a house that had been rented continuously for years by friends who would pass the place on to other friends when they moved out. Consequently, the place was full of junk and nobody knew who it belonged to. I don’t like clutter, so when I was living there I was constantly asking my roommates if stuff was theirs, and if it wasn’t, I usually threw it out.

Somewhere in that house hung two Tom Sawyer-style straw hats. One day, I got sick of them and asked my roommate Jake if they were his. He guessed they were probably some former tenant’s, but didn’t know who. I rolled my eyes and muttered, "I wish we could just send the old tenants all their crap that’s lying around all over the place." Excitedly, Jake replied, "We should!" Giggling gleefully, we threw one of the hats in a box Jake had, taped it shut and wrote Carl’s address on it, I guess since he was the only former tenant whose address we knew. I actually vaguely remember sending both hats, but I don’t know who we would have sent the other one to.

Carl was living in San Diego at the time, and what we didn’t know was that Carl’s mom had been regularly mailing him cookies. So when our box came in the mail, Carl’s roommate, seeing it was from Iowa, hungrily opened it up expecting fresh cookies. I forgot about the incident completely until years later, when I visited Carl and saw the hat hanging on his wall. I slyly asked, "Where did you get that hat?" Grinning immediately, he replied, "Did you send that?" and then relayed the story. I don’t know why, but it still makes me laugh.