What Is It About the American Continent and Letterboxes?

Whilst doing research to find an unusual letterbox, I discovered something about both the American and Canadian people - they like unusual letterboxes and they sell a lot of them.

Sure, in Australia and New Zealand we like unusual mailboxes, but nobody sells them. We have to resort to making them ourselves. There is an entire untapped industry here!

If you try to buy odd letterboxes in Australia, all you are likely to find is a choice of rather unremarkable and frankly quite boring mailboxes.

Casting my net further I went onto an auction website in both Singapore and the UK, and found that they also appear to find it difficult to express themselves through their letterboxes! The choices there were also rather disappointingly limited.

I hit the jackpot though when I went searching on an auction website in both the USA and Canada. There was a plethora of letterboxes from the most disturbing of cat letterboxes, through to cowboy mailboxes and one topped with a Harley motorcycle. 

There was a part of me that simply could not understand the desire to place an item on top of a letterbox that resembled a razorback pig, a chihuahua, a bear, a cow, a moose, or a hunter with a gun. Nor did I comprehend the need to amateurishly create a letterbox firetruck, school-bus or tractor and then try to sell them. While these were truly tragic, there were further eyesores in the shapes of ducks and fish and even a lobster trap mailbox.

Fortunately there were some more professional looking letterboxes including a horse-trailer and one of my favourites was a very realistic looking rattlesnake wound around the post of the mailbox. I'm sure my postie would appreciate that!

Perhaps, when I get my lighthouse letterbox set up, I may challenge some of the locals to create quirky and interesting letterboxes of their own, though hopefully avoiding attempts at cute cats and dogs.