Have you ever given a gift to a stranger? Someone once paid for my coffee in the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru and I started to cry. Random acts of kindness from strangers are very powerful. So if you want to brighten someone’s day, week or even month check out GiftaStranger.net. It helps connect you with a random person in your area. Just plug in your name, city and what you plan to give (may we suggest a traveling journal?) and they’ll give you a random recipient. The service is free and sounds like a pretty cool way to spread some love.

Most days my mailman doesn’t bring anything good. It’s credit card offers, political ads and junk mail. In fact according to statistics we receive an average of 16 pieces of junk mail a week, but only 1.5 personal letters. We believe that starting a traveling journal holds many benefits, including reigniting the dying art of letter writing. It’s a great way to rekindle your love affair with mail. But besides starting your own traveling journal, a great way to change the make-up of your mail is by eliminating junk mail.

Pesky junk mail actually does a lot of damage to our planet. More than 100 million worth of trees wind up as bulk mail. That’s equal to chopping down the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every four months, according to the Conserveatree and US Forest Service statistics. Here are three resources that may help you eliminate your junk mail:

1. TheCreditCommunity.com: This site encourages online credit card applications. They believe this method fits our changing society better than the stacks of paper applications that show up in our mailboxes anyway. Statistics show that 44% of our junk mail winds up in the trash unopened, and we can bet that most of those are credit card applications that we’re not interested in.

2. 41Pounds.org: This organization’s mission is to slash the amount of junk mail you receive each year. The average adult receives 41 pounds of junk mail annually and by signing up with 41Pounds.org that can be cut by as much as 95%. Doing your part by eliminating junk mail can make a big impact. Creating and shipping junk mail creates more greenhouse gases than nine million cars.

3. NewDream.org: You’ve probably heard of the National Do Not Call List. It was created to help stop telemarketing phone calls. Concerned consumers are asking legislators to take similar steps with junk mail. You can help by signing this petition that around 10,000 people already have signed. The ink in junk mail contains lots of heavy metals which can make it difficult to recycle, but this petition would allow consumers to eliminate it all together.

I’m definitely not against mail. I believe hand-written letters are a beautiful form of communication, but junk mail is definitely not something I support. It’s wasteful and unnecessary and I’d love to see a whole lot less of it show up in my mailbox. But as for those letters, keep them coming.

image courtesy of loop_oh

After nearly ten years of circulating our traveling journal we learned two things:

A. Finding the perfect box can be tough.

B. We’re busy and getting to the post office to mail our traveling journal isn’t always easy.

We solved both of those issues when we created our product line at TheTravelingJournal.com. Watch this video to see what we mean.

Shipping is easy when you buy journals and accessories from TheTravelingJournal.com. All of our journals are designed to fit into a small flat rate box from the USPS. No matter what you put inside it will only cost you $4.90 to ship. Now there’s no time wasted trying to find a box or get to the post office. We make it easy to start and continue the tradition of The Traveling Journal. Enjoy!

P.S.

In case you were wondering that video featured The Jessica Journal in aqua and the Clay Journal Case.

I don’t know about you, but my mailman hardly ever brings anything good. It’s usually bills, credit card offers and advertisements to stores I never shop in. Although I do love when my latest issue of Redbook or Real Simple shows up, it can’t compare to the day when The Traveling Journal arrives. It takes me back to summer camp when packages from home filled with little notes, homemade cookies and bug spray erased any inkling of home sickness, filling me with joy. Receiving The Traveling Journal means getting hand written letters from four of my favorite people. It means reliving some of life’s greatest moments and discovering little gems I had forgotten about since the last time I flipped through its pages.

Not only does it seem like letter writing is a dying art, but so is the art of creating pretty packages. When we ship orders that come into The Traveling Journal we try to make them creative and special– it just seems like a good way to start off the life of another Traveling Journal. We are inspired by the creativity some artists and craftsmen infuse into their packages. What’s inside matters most, but we believe a special delivery like The Traveling Journal deserves to shine on the outside too. Because the world would be a better place if we all received more pretty packages.

Photo courtesy of enigmachck1 and StationeryBoutique