Home › Features › Time Capsules
Letters your child opens in eighteen years
Write to the adult your child will become. Seal it. Nobody reads it — not the village, not a curious cousin, not you in a weak moment — until the year they turn eighteen.
- Sealed means sealed: the words are withheld, not merely hidden behind a banner
- Anyone in the village can leave one, and their own is always readable to them
- The seal opens in the year of the eighteenth birthday, worked out from the real date
A seal that is actually a seal
This is the feature it is easiest to fake, and faking it is worse than not having it. A sealed capsule's title, story and photographs are withheld at the point the page is built. They are not sent to the browser with a banner over them, and they are not returned by the API either.
What everyone else sees is that a letter exists, who it is from, and the year it opens — which is most of the charm — and nothing more.
Who can open one early
Two people. The parents, because they wrote most of them and they moderate everything on the site. And the author, so a grandmother can re-read what she wrote last spring without asking anyone.
Everybody else waits, including the rest of the village and anybody who happens to have your link.
Where the date comes from
The unlock year is the eighteenth birthday, derived from your child's actual birth date once you announce the arrival, or from the due date until then. Parents writing in their own journal can pick a later year — a sixteenth birthday, a wedding, a first day of school — and that choice is kept.
A capsule can never be set to unlock in the year it was written. That was a real bug in an early version: the year picker defaulted to the current year and produced letters sealed to nobody.
What people write
The letters that end up here are not the ones people post publicly. They are the specific ones: what the room smelled like, what your grandfather said when he first held them, what you were frightened of at 3am in the second week. That is the whole reason for the eighteen-year gap — it changes what people are willing to write down.
What it does not do
There is no cryptographic seal. A capsule is withheld by the application, and a determined person with direct access to the server's database file could read it. We are not going to claim otherwise. What is guaranteed is that no page, no API response and no export shown to a guest contains a sealed letter's words.
Questions
Can I read the letters people wrote to my child?
Yes — parents can see everything on their own registry, including sealed capsules. You are the custodian of it for eighteen years.
What if we do not still have the site in 2044?
Export the vault. Sealed letters are included in the parents' export, in readable JSON, so the words survive the software.
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