These past couple of weeks, I've had the privilege of re-living my childhood by borrowing a close friend's Nintendo 3DS. I myself had owned me a Nintendo DS Lite in my younger years (pink, if you were wondering), that I had unfortunately outgrown due to having messed up the bottom screen which, of course, interfered with game play. One of my favorite games on the Nintendo DS was the "Animal Crossing" series (Wild World in particular): a nifty and cute little game that allowed players to roam around town and make friends with anthropomorphic animal-like villagers, buy and sell furniture and the like to furnish one's home, catch fish and bugs or dig up fossils and donate them to a museum, or simply to build one's own repertoire! My friend whom I borrowed the DS from just so happened to have "Animal Crossing: New Leaf," so naturally I just had to indulge myself in hours upon hours of gameplay (probably not a wise decision given the upcoming finals I have lined up for me!).

Ah, that college student life. How I know it so well.

One thing I had forgotten about the game (among many other things) that I had the joy of rediscovering, was the fact that you sometimes received letters from an unidentified person in the game, simply labeled as 'Mom.' I knew you could send and receive mail from fellow villagers and from Nintendo itself, but forgot about the still-mysterious-after-10-years-or-so mother figure that other from the letters, is never mentioned anywhere else. Now here's where I admit my rather embarrassing confession: when I was younger, naive, glasses-less, and sported headache-rendering long pigtails that fell to my butt as a regular hairstyle, I thought that my actual mom was the one sending me these letters.

(Yes, I was a gullible child.) Obviously as I grew older I realized my actual mom didn't have the time to send me messages through a video game she probably didn't even understand how to play, and that it was a NPC in the game doing what it was supposed to do. The 'Mom' figure in the game apparently sends mail on certain dates outside of random ones, like your birthday, Toy Day, Mother's Day and the like. Sometimes she even sends you presents.

Some of them are pretty funny.

And some are a little more... cute, and sweet.

It was honestly really kind of nice to get these letters from 'Mom' in the mail every now and then these past couple of weeks, even if I am older now and know that it can't possibly be my mom sending me these letters through Pete the mail man (or bird), because she passed away years ago. So thanks, creators of "Animal Crossing," for looking out for kids whose parents have passed by making them feel like maybe, just maybe, they're sending messages from Heaven, through Pete, the mail bird.

Thanks, Pete.