There is a very comfortable stage of having an idea where the idea exists exclusively in your head, which is honestly a wonderful place for an idea to live because, at that point, it is still perfect.
Nobody has disliked it yet, nobody has misunderstood what you were trying to do, nobody has looked at it and gone, Oh. That’s it? You can change the font seventeen times, move something three millimeters to the left, decide at 11:46 at night that the entire thing needs a different shade of burgundy, and then announce to your husband that you finally figured out what was bothering you about page seven as though he has also spent the past four days thinking about page seven.
And, most importantly, there are no boxes of the idea sitting in your house yet.
Then you send it to print, and suddenly this little thing that has existed safely inside your computer becomes an actual thing, with actual quantities and actual shipping costs and actual people who are eventually going to open it and have opinions about it, which is where the whole experience becomes significantly more exciting and also significantly more terrifying.
That is more or less where I am right now.
Over the past few weeks, The Monthly Mail Club has gone from one of those ideas I kept turning around in my head, something I thought would be fun, and special, and very The Daily Tea, into this physical little thing you and I can actually hold, and somewhere during all of the designing and editing and changing my mind and changing it back again, it sort of became my baby.
Which means I am wildly excited to finally send it out. And also, since apparently we are being vulnerable today, a little scared.
Because I made it for you.
Because I think we need more things to look forward to.
Not necessarily enormous things, although I remain extremely supportive of vacations, big birthday parties, surprise upgrades and brand-new kitchens… I mean the smaller kind of anticipation that slips into regular life and makes an otherwise completely normal week feel a little more fun, because most of life, when you really think about it, happens on “a Greena Dinstig” (random Tuesday).
Most weeks do not contain a flight to Europe or a major life event; they contain groceries and appointments and WhatsApps you forgot to answer and laundry that has somehow multiplied since yesterday and the deeply unreasonable realization at 4:42 p.m. that the people in your house are, once again, going to expect dinner.
And somewhere along the way I became so excited with the idea that maybe regular life needs more tiny things to anticipate, not because everything has to be turned into an experience, but because there is something so nice about knowing that something is coming.
An envelope with your name on it.
A package you have been waiting for.
Something that arrives around the beginning of the month and is made for the exact season you are in right now, something you haven’t already seen twelve times while scrolling, something you actually get to open.
That is really where The Monthly Mail Club started.
I wanted to make something that would show up at your door every month and make an ordinary day feel, I don’t know, maybe twelve percent more exciting. Which, frankly, is sometimes all Tuesday needs.
And I wanted it to be physical.
I have nothing against the internet, obviously. I have built a rather unreasonable portion of my life on it, and I am the last person who is going to start giving speeches about how we all need to throw our phones into the Hudson River and return to correspondence by carrier pigeon.
But we have enough things living in tabs.
We have enough posts saved for later that we are absolutely, definitely going to come back to, and enough screenshots we no longer remember the reason for taking, and enough PDFs sitting in Downloads beside something called document (14).pdf.
I wanted to make something you could actually touch, something that could live on your counter and get a coffee ring on it and have a child scribble something in the corner, something you could shove into your bag and pull back out later when you suddenly remember that you wrote something important on page twelve.
I wanted it to be pretty enough that getting it in the mail feels like a little treat, but useful enough that three weeks later you are still actually using it, which sounds simple until you try to make it, because pretty things have a tendency to become precious and practical things have a tendency to look like they belong on a clipboard next to a printer.
I wanted both.
So we’re beginning with Tishrei.
And really, once I decided to do this, there was no other month I could imagine beginning with, because January may technically be the start of a new year, but I have personally never looked at January 1st and felt an overwhelming spiritual urge to reorganize my entire existence.
Tishrei, on the other hand, has opinions.
Tishrei arrives with school schedules and menus and simanim and clothes and meal invitations and cooking and shopping and approximately eleven thousand mental browser tabs open at once, while you are simultaneously trying to prepare for Yom Tov, start the school year like a competent person and convince yourself that this is absolutely the year you will not be standing in a grocery store twenty-four hours before Yom Tov wondering why every other woman apparently remembered that pomegranates are the VIP before you did.
But underneath all of that chaos, there is something I genuinely love about Tishrei, because it has this clean-page feeling to it, not in the unrealistic sense that everything from last year disappears and you emerge from Rosh Hashanah as an entirely new woman who meal plans and never loses her keys, but in the quieter sense that we get another beginning.
