Time Capsule Letters

For those who recognize the acronym Y2K (Year 2 Thousand) I’m sure you recall the overall anxiety as the year 1999 came to a close. Some folks thought the end of the world was coming…at midnight!

Others, myself included, wondered if our computers would handle the change from 1999 to 2000, or would all the computers crash and we’d end up off the grid and lose all our data. These were our fears, of life as we knew it, changing drastically overnight. But we did survive: the computers worked well and changed over to the new century, and the world did not come to an end on that New Year’s Eve.

In those days, we traditionally celebrated NYE with the same family friends; adults and young adults and kids all together. Each year we would celebrate by eating Christmas leftovers and playing games. 

On New Year’s Eve, 1999, we came up with the idea of writing time capsule letters. All nine of us wrote a letter without sharing it with the others. We sealed them and put them in the freezer! Where else? It’s a safe place we thought. These letters were to be opened in the year 2010…or on New Year’s Eve of 2009. I don’t remember what our 2010 letters said and I can’t believe I didn’t save them…but after reading our letters out loud to each other we enjoyed it so much we wrote time capsule letters again, to be opened in the year 2020…or the NYE of 2019.

As we visited our friends recently our letters appeared…brought out from a special storage box under the bed. This was an upgrade from the freezer storage system (which had led our youngest son to write on the outside of his sealed envelope….”Special Freezer proof time capsule envelope. Do not thaw until 2020.” Love that humor!)

As we read our letters a few days ago it was very interesting how many predictions came true, and how many amusing thoughts we all had written down. It was fun to read through them to those gathered there.

And yes, we did write more time capsule letters that evening…not to be opened until 2030, or the NYE of 2029.