Sticking with it

Christmas stamps, as featured on this year's COUNTRY LIFE Advent calendar cover, are a cherished annual event- but how did they become one?

- Emma Hughes

OF all Britain's Christmas traditions, special stamps are perhaps the most surprisingly modern—only 59 years old, to be exact.

Before 1966, if you were from the UK and wanted to pay for your postage at this time of year with something seasonally suitable, you had to be serving with the Armed Forces abroad: during the 1930s, British troops in Egypt sent Christmas post home bearing an 'Xmas Seal' decorated with a camel.

Commemorative stamps were already in circulation: following the launch of the prepaid, adhesive Penny Black in 1840, the first special-edition stamps celebrated the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, featuring a lion and George V (himself a keen philatelist). By the mid 1960s, sets were being printed every year, marking milestones ranging from the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Britain to the centenary of Joseph Lister's first use of antiseptic carbolic spray. The postmaster general began getting letters enquiring as to whether there might be a Christmas set, but, according to London's Postal Museum, quoting internal correspondence, it was felt that 'it would be extremely difficult to “do justice to an event of such transcendental importance as the birth of Christ".