Your Signature: Change It For Special Occasions—and Fun
Some people think there is only one way to write their signature, and they do it that way day after day, year after year, time after time. Yet others, those who may have a more creative bent to their personality, give their signature a very personal twist, changing that twist now and then, especially at special times of the year, or when something new and exciting comes along in their lives.
Of course your signature is personal. No two people have the exact same one. There are some folks, though, who play with their signature—fancying it up for Christmas cards, for example, or learning how to write it in calligraphy for other occasions. It’s yours, it’s only yours, so go ahead and do with it as you wish . . . enjoy it and play with it!
Truth is, our signatures change over time. There is a natural progression of aging which affects every part of us, and that includes how we sign our name. When we’re young, our letters tend to be immature, less structured, sometimes even written in block print, as we first learned it as young children. Some adults continue to write this way. My dad has always written in block letters, never using cursive lettering unless he’s required to do so in an official document. This is just his personal choice . . . and in a way, it’s his branding.
As teenagers, this is the time when many will experiment with their name, not only how they write it, but what they actually want it to say. I remember when I was, oh, about fourteen, I used to write my name as, “Eljay.” Though it didn’t sound any different when it was spoken, I thought it looked cool in print. It was in the ‘seventies and “cool” was the thing to be, after all. Just using my initials was bland . . . too, too, boring. But spelling out those initials, well, that was ultra-creative in my formative mind.
When we’re in our middle years, those years when we’re signing most of our official documents attached to employment, housing, military, births of children, and other such societal paperwork, we have a solid, no-nonsense, used-every-day type of signature which goes with us from year to year, job to job, child to child, and home to home. We rarely even consider the idea that we could “fiddle” with that signature if we cared to do so. Life is in the way, the years of being cool are behind us, and creativity isn’t foremost in our minds.
But there are those moments, during our middle years and as we age and find that life is finite and time is precious—and we realize that maybe we should take the time to see what else is available to us in every facet—at those times we will, as my grandmother used to say, “get a wild hair,” and add a curly-cue to our capital letters, or maybe a line with two dots under our full name. Hey, who’s going to tell us we can’t? It’s our name, and we’ve earned the right to post it however we want. Them’s the rules.
Our signature is one of the most personal avenues of creativity available to each and every one of us. We have a natural signature, the one that will come out on its own when we write our name, no matter what else we may have in mind. And then there’s that creative aspect inside all of us, even if it’s more buried in some than in others. This creativity allows us to add to our signature when we, in Grandma’s words, get that “wild hair” and brand ourselves in a very singular way. One specific time of year to do that, to make it special and different and even fun, is at Christmas, when we sign Christmas cards and address envelopes and write our names in the “from” spot on tags for gifts to family and friends.
It’s a festive period. Don’t get bogged down in all the duties and “have to’s” of the season, or of life. Let yourself go a little. Loosen up. Play. If it takes mixing up your signature a bit to get your family to laugh with you, or “ooh and aah” over your previously-latent creativity—that’s a good thing. Anything that brings about a pure and happy smile between you and those you love . . . that’s a great small way to bring some pleasure to yourself and some happiness to those around you.
