Christmas

In keeping with tradition, this year MaltaPost is issuing a set of three stamps bearing the Christmas theme. Linking all three stamps is a golden star hovering above the Virgin and Child, an angel and a festive wreath bedecked with ribbons and baubles.

How Christmas stamps originated remains a matter for debate, though it is clear that as far back as the 1930s British Forces in Egypt were issued with a (prepaid) Christmas stamp for their mail home. Austria and Brazil followed suit, but it was in 1943, in Hungary that a stamp depicting the Nativity was issued. In the Fifties, many countries like Cuba, Haiti, Luxembourg, Spain and Australia adopted this practice but it was really in the Sixties that this became commonplace.