Sealing Wax

There’s an old song where a paper boy takes a magic dragon strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff. I always used to think that sealing wax started with a “c” like ceiling wax, which I wasn’t even aware was a thing because I’d never really noticed wax on any of the ceilings in my house, so I just assumed that that lyric didn’t really make any sense. A few years later I learned what sealing wax actually was and it still didn’t make the song make sense, but at least I knew what they were talking about.

A while back I came into possession of a stick of sealing wax and seal. Naturally, this meant that I had to write some letters and send them off with wax seals.

I wrote six letters, which took all day because I wasn’t 100% focused on what I was doing. The whole thing took longer too because I forced myself to make the card, write the letter, and make an envelope before sealing it. Then repeating the whole process on the next one. This proved to be a pretty good strategy as the wax melting let off a semi-toxic smelling smoke that gave me a headache and made me feel like I was going to throw up. Other than that minor detail it was a really fun and relaxing activity.

I had very little confidence that any of these fancy seals would actually make it their recipients intact; and they didn’t. Well, that’s not true, the one that had the furthest to go survived. The rest fell off or showed up with a small drop of wax still on the envelope.

In the future, I think I’ll just use wax seals for letters that I deliver in person. That way they will be handled more gently than going through the mail system. Or sealing a letter and then putting that sealed letter in a different envelope.

Either way, I do recommend trying out using sealing wax, because I had a great time with this project apart from burning wax smoke.