"Tongue Secured" Would Work Well Too

Last night my lovely wife filled out a set of invitations for the Princess's birthday party later this month. Being young and full of exuberance, my daughter requested permission to put on stamps and lick the envelopes shut. I watched as she proceeded to shut them, her enthusiasm draining slightly each time, and I realized that there is absolutely no dignified way to lick an envelope closed.

Let us compare this to the olden days, when an envelope was properly sealed with a wax stamp. You write out some important letter, and then take a moment to melt a puddle of wax and firmly press into it your personal seal. It's so elegant and official.



For a long time now, we have instead used the standard gummed labels. This required that after you finished typing out your carefully thought out letter, you neatly folded it, slipped it into an envelope, and proceeded to slobber over the back of that envelope until the gummed portion (which invariably tastes like poison) was sufficiently covered in saliva to seal the envelope. You press shut the envelope, excess spittle oozing out of the freshly sealed edge, then do the same to the stamp and send the thing off.

Stop and consider for one moment how seriously icky this is. It's particularly rough for the poor schmoes at the post office who spend their days surrounded by envelopes sealed with the spit of strangers. It would be like me coming to work only to discover that while I was away, everyone in the office had licked my keyboard. (On a side note, this is one of the many fine reasons I don't clean the Cheeto dust off my keyboard. Its absence would serve as an immediate warning that my keyboard may have undergone a mass licking, requiring repeated washings with some variety of industrial strength cleaner. That's a little pro-tip for you non-computer geeks out there.)

Fortunately for those of us who are forced to consider such things, they now have these lovely self-adhesive envelopes. Between that and self adhesive stamp, I may now partake of the postal system in a relatively spit-free manner. This is a great relief to me as the one who typically sends out the bills and whatnot. As far as the cases such as invitations where they still rely on the licking-type envelopes, I'm thinking I may get a rubber stamp made to put on the back of the envelope.

"Lovingly sealed with my own bodily fluids", or something like that will do nicely I think.