Today and through the weekend, stamp collectors will congregate in New York City for the 60th annual  Fall 2009 Postage Stamp Mega Event.  Sixty stamp dealers an innumerable philatelists with meet at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan to trade their wares, see what’s new, and take in the sights and sounds of New York.  Of particular interest are the new stamp releases – this year, as in previous, the Fall Mega Event is the first place a collector can get the new holiday postage stamps.

The set of four, seen on the right, are the 2009 Winter Holidays stamps, depicting some common images of the Christmas season: a gingerbread man cookie, a toy soldier, a snowman, and a reindeer with a Christmas tree bulb hanging from one antler.   Designer Joseph Cudd of Greensboro, NC, under the art direction of long-time stamp designer Richard Scheaff, produced these stamps in a crisp contemporary design using rich cool colors.  For a more traditional style of Christmas stamp, the USPS will be releasing the Sassoferrato ‘Madonna and Child’ later in the month.  Since 1978, the USPS has released a postage stamp depicting Mary and the baby Jesus, primarily taken from a classic work of art.  This year’s stamp design is taken from a painting by Giovanni Battista Salvi, commonly known as Sassoferrato.   The Renaissance artist actually painted numerous similar paintings of the Madonna with Sleeping Child, all greatly desired by collectors, but this stamp depicts the Sassoferrato purchased by William Randolph Hearst in 1926.  In addition to the contemporary set and the Madonna and Child stamps, the USPS had planned on releasing a Christmasy stamp of an angel playing the lute, based on a Renaissance-era Italian fresco by Melozzo da Forli, but due to the stamp pricing schedule rearrangement, it was dropped from this year’s release schedule.

The ASDA stamp First Day events are holiday stamps, remember, so the two other major December holidays get their own stamps as well.  This year’s Hanukkah postage stamp is the 14th stamp for this holiday issued by the USPS, but is the first unique design in several years.   Unlike the 2d art of other recent stamps, this Hanukkah stamp is actually a photograph of a 3D menorah, custom metalwork sculpted by artist Lisa Regan of Garden Deva Sculpture Company in Tulsa, OK.   The menorah has a very modern style, consisting of concentric semicircles of rough metal, mostly a pewtery silver with accents in a bright copper.  I am actually disappointed that copies of the menorah is not available on her website.  The last holiday stamp this year, honoring the holiday of Kwanzaa, also pulls from modern art, this time Cubism.  Artist Lloyd McNeill created this striking stamp design, readily recalling the style of one of McNeill’s mentors, Pablo Picasso, depicting a father, mother, and child composed of crisp, bold solid colors, reminiscent of paper cut-outs.

Visually, I find the Kwanzaa stamp the most appealing, artistically, of this year’s holiday stamps, almost more worthy of being on displayed on a wall than on a stamp; as I’ve noted, I’d prefer the Hanukkah stamp on my mantle than as a stamp, but it, too, is a strong visual image for this year’s stamp.   The Christmas/Holiday stamps are a more traditional stamp, and probably more of what Grandma expects to see on the Christmas cards she receives, so I might be most likely to actually mail the Madonna and Child stamps.   The block of four stamps, of course, are the most mainstream, and the ones that will be the most common on envelopes this Christmas season; the USPS has done a good job of identifying the stamps of most appeal to philatelists and put greater artistic work into those, and as holiday stamps go, these are some of the better designs in recent years.   If you’d like your first-day cover of any of these, be sure to get to New York today or tomorrow: the ASDA Mega-Event is the only place to get them first-hand.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 12:06 am and is filed under collecting fyi, events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.