Posted on 12/07/2007 1:56:37 PM PST by Coleus
During the Christmas season, when Christmas displays and the public outcry against them get almost equal billing, the tiny postage stamp dares to push the envelope, so to speak. While some towns are battling over the use of red and green lights on city buildings, Nativity scenes in parks and what to call holiday evergreen trees, the tiny adhesive squares on billions of letters and packages this December will subtly remind postal workers and mail recipients about Christmas and other religious holidays.
This year the Postal Service has issued more than 2.6 billion holiday stamps. The majority of them are called "holiday knits" featuring Christmas images that look like hand-knit evergreens, snowmen, deer and teddy bears. The rest of the seasonal stamps feature the Madonna and Child and commemorate Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and Muslim festivals.
According to a 2007 press release by the Postal Service, the Madonna and Child stamp has been a U.S. tradition since 1978. What it doesn't describe is the road it took to get there.
The series actually got its start in 1966, four years after the first Christmas stamp debuted with a wreath, two candles and the words "Christmas 1962." The first religious Christmas stamp owes its origin in part to the lobbying efforts of the late Anthony Coviello, a parishioner at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Waterbury, Conn.
The 1966 stamp, "Madonna and Child With Angels," started a trend of Christmas stamps featuring Renaissance paintings. The series was interrupted in 1977 when the Christmas stamp featured a praying George Washington.
The next year the Postal Service resumed the Madonna and Child stamps and the series has continued ever since, with a close call to stop production in 1995.
When a Postal Service advisory committee voted to replace the Madonna and Child stamp with a Victorian-era angel, a flurry of negative reaction from public interest groups and even then-President Bill Clinton, prompted an immediate reversal. Marvin Runyon, postmaster general at the time, said the Madonna and Child stamp would stay, at least while he was in office, because it had "occupied an important place" for so many years and was "meaningful to so many Americans."
And in 2007, the Madonna and Child stamp is still sticking to its spot in the right corner of millions of pieces of mail. This year's "Madonna of the Carnation" is a detail of a Bernardino Luini painting of the same name from around 1515 and housed in Washington's National Gallery of Art. Frances Frazier, community relations specialist for the U.S. Postal Service, told Catholic News Service Nov. 28 that every year about this time the Postal Service gets complaints about its stamps, including objections that they are called "Christmas stamps" -- even though they're listed as "holiday stamps" on the Web site.
Frazier said the Postal Service tries to please everyone by offering stamps for other religious and ethnic celebrations. The Hanukkah stamp marking the eight-day Jewish festival of lights debuted in 1996. The Kwanzaa stamp for the African-American holiday first appeared in 1997 and the Eid stamp commemorating the Muslim festivals of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha was introduced in 2001. And while some complain that religious stamps are even made available, Frazier said plenty of others complain that there are not enough of them.
This year the Postal Service hopes the 700 million Madonna and Child stamps will satisfy customer needs. It also has printed 50 million Kwanzaa, 50 million Hanukkah and 40 million Eid stamps.
The Postal Service has already identified several works of art that it plans to use for future Madonna and Child stamps and it doesn't expect to run out of images any time soon. The hard part, said Frazier, is finding different styles and varieties. Across the ocean, the Royal Mail, the United Kingdom's postal service, alternates between religious and secular Christmas stamps each year. This year it is selling angels and Madonna and Child stamps. Last year's Santa, snowmen, Christmas tree and reindeer stamps were criticized by religious groups for their lack of a Christian message.
But the stamp alone is not the ultimate Christmas message. A 2006 survey conducted by the British newspaper the Daily Mail revealed that only one in 100 Christmas cards sold in Britain contained a religious image or message as Nativity scenes have been replaced with winter landscapes or cute designs. Despite their message or lack of one, the 2 billion holiday cards expected to be mailed in the United States this year still remain a holdout to electronic alternatives.
The number of electronic cards, or e-cards, is just a fraction of the 6 billion paper cards sent throughout the year in the United States, including Christmas, which generates the most cards, according to the Greeting Card Association. And the Postal Service is happy to add that e-cards are hardly taking over since it reports that one e-card is currently sent for every 20 paper cards mailed each year. So it looks like the stamp, whatever its design, also comes with the message that it's here to stay.
Thanks for posting this. I’ll come back later and read!
The USPS had to withdraw the Hillary Clinton postage stamp.
People could not get it to stick to the envelope, because they were spitting on the wrong side.
.....Bob
2001 Eid stamp.
Joy to the world! The Lord is come.
Let earth receive her King
Let every heart
Prepare Him room
And Saints and angels sing
And Saints and angels sing
And Saints and Saints and angels sing
Joy to the world, the Saviour reigns
Let Saints their songs employ
While fields and floods
rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy
Repeat the sounding joy
Repeat, Repeat, the sounding joy
Joy to the world with truth and grace
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness
And wonders of His love
And wonders of His love
And wonders and wonders of His love
No more will sin and sorrow grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He’ll come and make the blessings flow
Far as the curse was found,
Far as the curse was found,
Far as, far as the curse was found.
He rules the world with truth and grace,
And gives to nations proof
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love;
And wonders of His love;
And wonders, wonders of His love.
Rejoice! Rejoice in the Most High,
While Israel spreads abroad
Like stars that glitter in the sky,
And ever worship God,
And ever worship God,
And ever, and ever worship God.
Joy To The World
Isaac Watts(1674-1748)
I have already used more than 100 of these stamps this year. I think they are beautiful.
I can’t help but see the twin towers in the center of this satanic stamp.
The EID stamp of course.
What about Festivus??
(A guy in my wife's office brought in a Festivus pole a couple of days ago.)
My country,’ tis of Thee,
sweet land of liberty, of Thee I sing;
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims’ pride,
from every mountainside let freedom ring!
2. My native country, Thee,
land of the noble free, Thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
thy woods and templed hills;
my heart with rapture thrills, like that above.
3. Let music swell the breeze,
and ring from all the trees sweet freedom’s song;
let mortal tongues awake;
let all that breathe partake;
let rocks their silence break, the sound prolong.
4. Our fathers’ God, to Thee,
Author of Liberty, to Thee we sing;
long may our land be bright
with freedom’s holy light;
protect us by Thy might, great God, our King.
M E R R Y C H R I S T M A S!
I hope you told her what to do with the pole.
LOL! I was wondering how long it would be before someone mentioned Festivus!
2001 Eid stamp
Those are still on sale. I just bought some. I think it's an unusually attractive stamp, even a work of art. Whatever you think of Islamic culture or religion, they have excelled in calligraphy. I don't read Arabic although I do know that they have some letters with tall vertical lines. I think the twin towers thing is far-fetched. In any case, note that the Eid stamp shows a Christmas Tree. Probably the Madonna stamps would not last very long if there wasn't a representative stamp for other religious festivals.
Why would anyone want Madonna stamps?
She's a washed up old hag and her music ALWAYS sucked.
The Holiday for the Rest of Us!
Okay—sorta funny—but not really. I never followed the singer by that name, but managed to get the impression that she was more or less a slut.
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child ... Holy Infant, so tender and mild .....
I have nothing against the Islamic culture nor religion, I am against the tyranny of the minority and the left using so called “diversity” in their war on America’s Christian heritage. Christians are still the majority in America and should be able to celebrate Christmas openly without having to genuflect to ever other religion in order to do so. Make no mistake the atheists of the ACLU support all things Islam yet constantly sues to remove Christ from American history. It won’t be long before they go after Corpus Christie, San Francisco, Saint Louis etc... Each and every one of these places began as Christian missions. Just wait the news will read, “Since the thousands of Christian names given to American towns and cities are “offensive” to Muslims we must begin renaming them in honor of the honorable prophet Mohammed. Think it is a stretch? It is happening before your very blind eyes. Beautiful stamp? Anything but.
Try www.usps.com.
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