Imagine if the USPS made a Christmas Nativity Scene sheet

I don't know if they would for the political backlash. Just in stamps this year you have religious and non religious Christmas. That alone gets hate mail from (or really hate emails) from separation from church and state people and the keep Christ in Christmas people. Then you have 2 Kwanzaa & Hanukkah 1 Diwali & Eid Greetings. Past that you need just winter this year flowers and otters with snowballs. I am sure some people are still not happy.

Add to that on the environment people screaming about the waste and killing the planet for all the extra paper in a souvenir sheet.      

That's a great idea!!   

There are lawsuits and from friends that work for the postal inspectors office lots of hate. No the other religions do not sell as well but if you represent more religions you can sell the ones that do.  

The love stamps are good sellers not just for VD day but for weddings engagements I think the numbers show what sells:

In Millions

Love 150 
Holiday Elves 600
Hanukkah 12
Kwanzaa 12
Virgin and Child 200
US Flags 1,500
Nancy Regan 18
Go Beyond 45
School Bus 100
Women Rowing 18

So the ranks by number printed is Flag, Non Religious Christmas, Religious Christmas, Love, School Bus, and the rest are way under that 45 to 12 million

Andy, I know you’re just thinking out loud and you mean no harm here. But I have to say I don’t agree with your conclusion ("There is no need for a Hanukkah stamp."). Yeah, Hanukkah stamps don’t sell as well as Christmas ones — there are a lot fewer Jews in this country than there are people who celebrate Christmas. But not everything is about numbers.

It means a lot to me as a Jewish stamp collector to be able to buy Hanukkah stamps every couple of years. It made me really happy to see this year’s stamps. They're beautifully designed, I used them to make FDCs and to send letters to friends and family. They tell people like me that we’re included, that we’re part of America. What message would it send if USPS followed your advice and stopped printing them? Again, I know you mean well. But I had to say something.

Secular Christmas stamps have outnumbered the religious ones by about 15 to 1 on mail received here in the last several years. There are a couple of religiously-themed Christmas stamps that I never even saw. And our friends and families aren't exceptionally secular as a group.


I didn't take the time to look it up, but I remember from years ago that the Simpsons stamps were a very strange affair. The USPS sold so many of them that they ordered a second printing. And sales stopped almost immediately. It wasn't the stamps that were unpopular, it was that the USPS got it spot-on the first time and didn't know it.

I don't get enough mail with commemoratives on the envelopes to make this anywhere near statistically valid, but stamps with historical events and people from American political history - the bread and butter of the stanp program from the Colombus and Trans-Mississippi series through all the Bicentennial overissuing and into the 1980s - never show up in our mail. I got tons of those Disney and Bugs Bunny stamps, the superheroes, even Hot Wheels (which I barely knew existed, ever) and a couple of Harry Potters.

The only historically-oriented stamps I remember being at all popular in the last ±20 years were the 50-state-plus-a-few-territories flag coils. I went through sheets of the 39¢ Benjamin Franklin stamps from 2006 because I liked them so much, and I think the only copies I have are on a couple of letters that got returned to me. Put Peanuts on stamps, and I'd probably have 30 of them. (And I'm so sick of Peanuts I can have nihilistic thoughts all day just from seeing one of those kids. The first 300 times around were fine for those moldy old gags, thank you very much.) They did use a quote from John Adams on postmarks for a few months, in the days when postmarks were so ugly you couldn't read them and probably avoided even looking at them anyway, but you'll probably never see him on a stamp ever again because nobody would buy it. Except me. Short, portly New Englanders with bad hair and irascible temperaments, we gotta stand up for each other.

I understand and respect that a lot of people wouldn't want to have slaveholders on their stamps. But political or moral beliefs aside, I don't think the traditional historical topics cut much ice with the buying public these days, no matter what good (or bad) in our history they represent. I do appreciate that the USPS has featured many incredibly good American artists in recent years. I wish they'd do another series of incredibly good American musicians and composers, preferably with designs that aren't comic book covers like those 80s and 90s ones were, but I know they wouldn't be popular. (What ever happened to that one-a-year series with Ray Charles, Elvis, Lydia "Who?" Mendoza, Hendrix, Janis, etc. Was that quietly cancelled? We need another John Coltrane stamp, and I wouldn't mind a couple of peeps like Perry Como, either. Tony Bennett, absolutely. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, just get it done already!)

Basically, I'd like it if there were more Christian-themed Christmas stamps, and I think they should have some American folk art or modern Christian art. And yeah, I'm all in favor of Hanukkah and Eid and all the others, too, and I sometimes use them on seasonal greetings. And I do like @apastuzak's ideas for Christmas and Hanukkah. I'd buy 'em.

There have been folk art issues. I just want less pop culture (super heros, movie characters like Harry Potter, etc).

If they issues more Christian specific art they would be forced to add more other non-Christian religious art.

That's exactly what I am thinking.  And it does not need to be limited to just the religious Christmas stamps. You could do a sheet for "Santa's Workshop," or a scene from a Ranin-Bass Christmas special. Kids would BEG their parents to buy sheets like that. I'd love to see a sheet of "Christmas Traditions Around The World" stamps, that shows various Christmas tree styles, yule logs, and other things around the world that other cultures do on Christmas.

I feel like any stamp that USPS issues for a non-secular holiday, should come on a small souvenir sheet, with a block of 4 stamps on the left or right and a paragraph or two of descriptive text around off to the side. This could include Kwanzaa, Eid, Hanukah, Diwali, or any holiday.

Ukraine does these series of stamps called "National Minorities of Ukraine." They have four stamps for each minority.  So far they have done:

1. Crimean Tatars
2. Jews
3 Roma
4. Greeks

I wish those stamps came on souvenir sheets with descriptive texts.

I asked my father once about how minorities are treated in Western Ukraine where he grew up. He said the largest minority group he interacted with was the Jews. He said Ukrainian tailors HATE Jews. Jews are known for being such good tailors, if a Jewish tailor moves into a town, he can quite literally put all the Ukrainian tailors out of business in a few weeks in a pretty big area, because everyone wants to go to the Jewish tailor.

And he said back in the 1920s-30s, you didn't throw anything away.  If pot or pan or other kitchen utensil broke, you saved it and when the Roma came through, there's be a huge line for them to fix stuff. No one would even dream of letting anybody other than the Roma fix their stuff because they wanted it "done right."