I can clearly remember my freshmen year in college writing plenty of letters and receiving a goodly number in return. My high school pals and I were still feeling close even though the distances between us grew wider with each passing day.
I don't remember the exact date when mail became little more than magazines, catalogs, and bills but people mostly stopped using the US Mail for correspondence around the same time they discovered email. Bills have even stopped appearing at many homes with the advent of online bill paying. Catalogs still appear with regular frequency though nothing like the old Sears catalog in terms of size and the anticipation it used to produce in its recipients.
Even cards at Christmas time have seemingly become less important, too. I am as guilty as many folks are of writing only a short hello along with a happy holidays on our Christmas cards, which doesn't truly count as a letter in the traditional sense.
I suppose it is only a matter of time before Saturday mail delivery will be eliminated on economic grounds. There will no doubt be a flurry of mild protests and many short pieces on the evening news regarding the loss of this service, but in the end it won't matter much to people. We have become so used to the instantaneous communication of the Internet that the loss of snail mail delivery on Saturday won't leave much of a void in most people's lives. The only people who will miss it will be the postal workers themselves who might have been earning overtime by working or the part timers who only worked on Saturdays.
Sadly to say Saturday mail delivery is one of those quaint ideas which future generations will ponder for a moment and then get back to all their multiple channels of communication, which never shut down for holidays or are limited by the cessation of a Saturday delivery.
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