How often do you receive handwritten notes or personal letters in the mail? It may be rare, but I’ll bet the sight of a handwritten envelope in your mailbox makes you smile. One of my 2025 goals is to deliver more smiles!

Welcome to the 94^th edition of The Sunday Spark, a series with weekly thoughts and highlights, nuggets of learning, and a decluttering challenge for the week. Along with handwritten notes, today’s post looks at Christmas tree flocking, sustainable universities, and wrapping up the decluttering challenge.

On my mind this week: Delivering smiles with handwritten notes

Thanks to the Canada Post strike, I received only a handful of Christmas cards this year. Throughout December, I missed opening my mailbox to see handwritten envelopes with cheerful greetings.

Had the strike happened at any other time of year, it may have gone unnoticed. Most days, our mailbox is empty. When we do get mail, it’s usually bulk mail or junk mail. The sight of a handwritten envelope holding a personal note, letter, or card is a rare treat in our digital world.

You can’t deny the convenience of digital greetings. I do send e-cards, but digital messages just don’t evoke the same warm, fuzzy feeling as handwritten messages. Like most things in our digital world, the satisfaction I get from an e-card is fleeting. Sometimes the message gets buried in my inbox and I forget to open it until the reminder email pops into email a few days later. After I view the greeting, I send it to my Trash folder where the message and thought behind the greeting are gone forever.

The enduring power of a handwritten note

On the other hand, when I receive a handwritten greeting, I tear open the envelope right away. After reading the message, I often display the card on a string in my kitchen. And I keep the most special of greetings in my treasure box.

A handwritten note or letter takes time, thought and effort on the part of the sender. For the receiver, that personal greeting is an enduring message that they can keep and look at from time to time. Consider how much history we would have lost if soldiers on the front lines in World War II had sent emails to their loved ones.

As I was thinking about goals and projects for 2025, I decided to start a handwritten note project. Every week, I will mail a personal message to someone. It may be a birthday or anniversary card, a postcard, a thank you note, or a simple “thinking of you” message.

My goal is to deliver smiles. One handwritten message at a time.

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Three highlights of the week

It’s important to celebrate big milestones and simple pleasures in life. Keeping the trend going, here are three highlights and simple pleasures of the week gone by:

• It snowed on Monday, and the snow stuck around for Christmas Day! It was a white Christmas.
• Our choir sounded beautiful at Mass on Christmas morning. Everything came together well—even the difficult song we had been working on.
• My Mum, sister and cousin came over for dinner on Christmas Day. We had roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and all the trimmings. It was a pleasant change from the traditional Christmas turkey.

Things I learned this week

Life is all about learning. Here are a couple of things I learned this week:

What the flock is that on your Christmas tree?

Earlier this week, I saw a headline about “flocked” Christmas trees. I had never heard the term before, so I read the article. I learned flocking is a substance that people spray on Christmas trees to make them look more like trees in winter. It seems this is a thing in areas that don’t get snow in winter.

If you are a flocker, beware. Most municipal “treecycling” collection programs do not accept flocked trees. White tinsel garland would be a reusable, and more environmentally friendly, alternative to flocking.

(Source: Earth911)

University of Toronto is the world’s most sustainable university

Two Canadian universities have ranked in the top five of Quacquarelli Symond’s ranking of the world’s most sustainable universities. The ranking evaluates universities based on environmental education and research, operational sustainability, equality, and governance.

The University of Toronto topped the list for the second straight year with an overall score of 100. Vancouver’s University of British Columbia ranked in fifth place with a score of 98.6. Other universities in the top five are ETH Zurich, Lund University in Sweden, and University of California, Berkeley.

Locally, the University of Waterloo ranked 60^th with a score of 90.8, and my alma mater, Wilfrid Laurier University, ranked 454^th with an overall score of 63.8.

(Source: QS World University Rankings)

This week’s decluttering challenge – Wrapping it all up!

In 2024, I revisited the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge I completed in 2021. This week, I wrapped up the challenge with an overview of my learnings and the final tally for the year. Learn more in this week’s decluttering post.

With round two of the decluttering challenge completed, it’s time to turn our attention to something new for 2025. Watch for details next week in The Sunday Spark.

I’d love to hear what you think about any of this week’s topics. Drop me a comment below and let me know your thoughts and ideas.