Amish “Circle Letters” (Explained)
I asked Marlene Lehman about the Amish custom of circle letters. If you haven’t heard of the circle letter, it’s a delightfully old-fashioned way for Amish people (with some sort of connection – sometimes “deep”, sometimes based on coincidence) to stay connected across communities.
A viewer on YouTube jokingly referred to the circle letter as “Amish group chat”. Marlene explains more in our talk, which you can view above, or read the full transcript below.
Marlene Lehman belongs to an Old Order Amish church in Shipshewana, Indiana, and is a co-founder of Plain & Simple magazine.
Marlene Explains the Amish Custom of Circle Letters
Erik Wesner: Circle letters. Do you write them? What’s a circle letter?
Marlene Lehman: Like, usually, it’s 10 to 12 different women that start the letter, and it just goes from one person to the next. There were 12 of us classmates, that went to the same school. We were in different grades, but all in the upper grades.
Marlene: So there’s 10 of us left in that circle letter, and it comes around maybe every month or every two months really, is when it comes along.
And I have some that used to be schoolmates living in Wisconsin and different communities, but we each share whatever is happening in our lives at the time.
Erik: And the way it works is you have like, each person writes a letter on a piece of paper?
Marlene: Yes.
Erik: And the next person, puts theirs on top of it, I guess, staples it or attaches it. So and then the next and the next. And so you have, I don’t know, seven, eight, 10 people, and it just gets like a chain. It gets mailed to the next person all the way around?
And then what happens, it comes back to you. Like, let’s say you started it, and then you remove your old letter. Right?
Marlene: Yeah. You remove the old letter, and if I reread it, I thought, “oh, that’s what was happening at that time!” So, yeah, it’s kind of interesting if you keep them all.
Erik: Gotcha. So you remove your old letter and then you add a new one and then mail it to the next?
Marlene: Yes – and then mail it to the next. I always like to write it, like, the same day or the next day after reading them, so it’s out of the way and I don’t forget about them.
Erik: And how long do you have to wait for it to come around again?
Marlene: Oh, sometimes with the mail the way it is…One of the girls said hers came back after a month, and she had the right address on, but it came back to her. And so she had to send it off again, with an apology [laughter]. Uh-huh.
Erik: So it didn’t even get around?
Marlene: Yeah. It didn’t get around for, like, two months. And I wondered where it was stuck because some people keep them and forget about them or they were on a trip or something.
Erik: So someone’s out of town, and it’s just sitting in the mailbox. Okay.
Marlene: Yeah. It’s always interesting, though, to see them.
Erik: But, like, on average, does it take, like, a month or 2 months to come back around to you?
Marlene: Usually 2 months. If everybody cooperates, it’s 2 months.
Erik: Okay, everybody has to do their part and not sit on it, right That was your school group. Now it’s not just for school groups. Right? I mean, there are other types of..?
Marlene: Yeah. One of my sister-in-laws, her name is Elsie, and then she has an Elsie circle letter. So it’s it’s Elsies from anywhere, like Ohio and different Amish communities.
Erik: Just a group of people. They all have one thing in common, is the first name Elsie or whatever. Could be Emma. Could be Ben. Could be anything. Right?
Marlene: Yeah.
Erik: Is it more a a female or woman’s thing? Do men participate in circle letters as well?
Marlene: Well, there are some people that have family letters. We used to have a family letter, because I have a sister in Chouteau, Oklahoma.
Erik: Biggest Amish community in Oklahoma, I think. Right?
Marlene: Yeah. But it kinda got stuck someplace, and, yeah, it just didn’t go on.
Erik: And then would there be some for, like, occupations like, I heard there’s some for people that are interested in a certain hobby, like birders, maybe even people that have the similar experiences, like maybe they lost a loved one. Have you heard of those types?
Marlene: There could be letters like that. I wouldn’t be surprised because they have reunions like that. It may be a woodworker’s reunion or a they have a sudden death reunion, and that’s usually people who’ve lost a child or something like that. Support.
Plain & Simple
Erik: Yeah. Real quick on the magazine, Plain & Simple. What is in the the latest issue? What are some highlights?
Marlene: This is Gina Yutzy. She did her own shiplap or wainscoting. There’s a small table my husband made for me to use that grilling table. There’s a hotbed you’d wanna make in the fall, so you’d have it for spring. A tomato cage plant stand. Oh, these are the gourds.
Erik: Okay. Last time people got on me because I didn’t give a good view it off of the some of the crafts [laughter]. Okay. Is that a raccoon or something there? I can’t really see.
Marlene: There’s a chicken sitting on a nest. These are some my husband painted. And these are some more at Smucker’s Gourd Farm there in Pennsylvania. If you get back there, yeah, check them out. It’s amazing what all they do with their gourds. It’s in Lancaster.
Erik: So people can check out the magazine at plainsimplemag.com. You’ve got the digital subscriptions and also the regular hard copy subscriptions for people that want either option, right?
Marlene: Yeah.
Erik: It comes out every two months, right? Just to be more clear, it’s two-month basis. It’s a bimonthly.
Marlene: They have to get their subscription in before the 19th of the month before it comes out.
For more, see:
- Learning from Amish Letters
- Marlene Lehman: My Typical Day
- Marlene Shares 6 Homemade Crafts
- Marlene Shares Her Favorite Amish Dishes
Circle Letters
We call them “Round Robin” letters. I know several non Amish families that do this. I think the use of these has diminished with the advent of email, but it is still done.
Round robin is a great name for it and it seems quite a few people know this custom by that name.
My local church has several small groups that meet every two weeks on Wednesday evenings for fellowship, devotions, and sharing of concerns. Our meeting place rotates between members’ homes. During “Covid Lockdown” we decided not to meet for several months. I had heard of “circle letters” amongst the Amish, so suggested our group begin a “circle letter”. The members all agreed to do this and we kept in touch with each other via an “email circle letter” on the internet every two weeks. We did this for several months and then when we were once again out in public we discontinued our “circle letter” and resumed meeting in members’ homes.
Nice to hear you adapted this custom Al. I like the idea and I bet it was appreciated in the group. There’s something about writing something deliberately, at a set interval, that seems to me to make it more special or valued than say just periodic chatting on messenger apps or the like.
Circle Letters
Circle Letters are what we used to call chain letters. My mother and some of her family used to write chain letters .
Now my brother and I do much the same thing (except much faster) by writing email letters to each other. We shortened the process by addressing them to both recipients. Then each recipient can chime in and make comments about what the original letter addressed, and then add some new topic(s).
Of course the Amish would not have computers and Internet service in their homes, but ours is an adaptation of the principle of the circle letter.