Odds & Ends: Stamps

"A Christmas card without a Christmas stamp is like a birthday cake without a candle." - Nigel Slater

Guilty! The Christmas cards I send are more often than not without Christmas stamps. However, this wasn't the case this year. I ordered two sets of Christmas themed stamps in late November online direct from the United States Postal Service. 

The more secular set featured images from mid-20th century era Coca-Cola Santa Claus ads and were released in 2018. 

According to the USPS website, "The Postal Service issues four new stamps and a souvenir sheet showcasing classic images of Santa Claus painted by famed commercial artist Haddon Sundblom. Each stamp portrays a close-up of Santa's face. The four images featured in the booklet are details from larger paintings created by Sundblom and originally published in ads for The Coca-Cola Company from the 1940s through the early 1960s. Sundblom is the man credited with refining the modern image of Santa Claus."  

From the website Linn's Stamp News: "The tradition Christmas stamp for 2020 features a detail of the 18th century painting Our Lady of Guapulo by an unknown Peruvian artist. The painting is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the museum is identified in small type along the stamps bottom."

From the USPS website: "Enrobed in a pyramidal gown speckled with jewels and holding a scepter woven with roses and leaves, a crowned Virgin Mary looks down at a similarly adorned Christ Child in her left arm." This stamp was released in 2020. 

The first Christmas stamp issued in the United States came in 1962 after many years of requests from postal customers for just such a thing. The stamp proved to be quite popular. According to the U.S. Postal Service 1 billion of these stamps were printed and distributed by the end of 1962. 

Mom always had Christmas stamps for our family's Christmas cards. I remember her sitting at the dining room table with quite a station set up to get the cards ready. They had to be addressed and the circular letter she wrote had to be inserted in the envelope along with the card. People used to send out so many more Christmas cards than they do now. Pictured above is one stamp I remember from childhood.