It’s that time of year again and history tells us that the often-repeated message churned out during the Christmas holiday period, wishing for ‘Peace on Earth’, will never happen. My negativity was aroused when searching for appropriate stamps for this article, whereby I thought I’d take a look back at some of the earlier Christmas stamps. I came across the two Spanish stamp sheets seen above which were issued in 1941 to commemorate the second anniversary of the liberation of Barcelona by General Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War.

On a brighter note, Hungary produced these nativity-themed stamps in 1943.

Some ‘Guiding Light’ stamps, from Cuba 1957 and Australia the same year. More colour was injected by South Korea for it’s 1957 Christmas stamps, shown below individually and as three valuable stamp sheets.

A floral theme from El Salvador, 1960.

Beautiful illustrations of wildlife, Cuba 1961. You can see further beautiful similarly-themed examples issued by Cuba in the following years at freestampcatalogue.com. Above, Cuba 1967.

Malawi, 1964. Peru, 1965.

Ecuador, 1967.

On a different tack, Man-on-the-Moon overprints from Togo, 1969.

Finally, four-stamp set from Switzerland issued in 2017 including a thoroughly modern Father Christmas using a mobile phone.

Naturally this could be a topic for many collectors and this brief article shows a tiny example of the thousands of Christmas stamps that have been produced over the years, many of which can be found in the webshop of postbeeld.com.

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