Christmas is coming!
Now that the candies of Saint Nicolas are in the shop windows, we dare to bother you with our yearly news on Christkindl.
That Austrian place has a postal office that uses two beautiful, different stamps in the Christmas period: one upto December 25th, the other from that date on. Lots of collectors take this opportunity to score with those stamps. The Austrian postal administration even release special Leitzettel, small stickers with the text on Christkindl. It seems like there is enough interest in the stamps to make something beautiful of the Leitzettel as well. Anyhow, the German stamp magazine Michel Rundschau shows what the Zettel look like this year. They are sold in a booklet of six adhesive ‘stamps’. The price: 36 eurocent or 6 cent per piece. Indeed, not even the sun will rise for nothing… We find it a little odd that these stickers are not for free (in the end, they are postal stickers, not the real stamps), but there is even more reason to be sad. Fritz Kaiser, an Austria specialist from Lelystad in Holland, was so kind to draw our attention to this aspect of the matter. What’s wrong? The initial idea was not to release stickers, but stamps. The well-known artist Adolf Tuma had already drawn a design, which was accepted by the Philateliebeirat (a kind of advisory commission) and then offered to the postal direction. It will have been difficult for the collectors that the Austrian postal administration then decided to come up with (quite large) stickers. Tuma’s creations are very beloved in Austria; the present permanent stamps were designed by him.
More info:
Maandblad Filatelie
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