In 1962, when the U.S. Post Office Department released a jingle to go with its first ever Christmas stamp. Set to the tune of Jingle Bells, it went:
“Christmas stamps, Christmas stamps, making our debut
We’ll brighten up your Christmas cards, and speed them onto you.
Don’t delay, mail today, it’s later than you think.
We’ll put them through for you, quicker than a wink.”
The jingle, which was played on TV and radio and at post offices, made me wonder: why is the Post Office honoring a religious holiday? And why did it wait until 1962 to do so?
My questions reveal my longstanding, ambivalent and difficult relationship with Christmas. These “issues” go back to when I was kid in Summit, NJ in the 1960s and early 1970s. Although the town was home to two Jewish synagogues, in the 1960s it felt like a very Christian place. When we moved there in 1963, there supposedly were parts of town where realtors wouldn’t show houses to Jews (not that my family could have afforded houses in those neighborhoods). I was usually the only Jewish kid in my elementary school classes, which meant that I was often called on to explain Hanukkah.
So lots of people were Christians, and, from the outside, it looked like Christmas was a big deal, which meant I was missing out-one of the worst feelings you can have as a kid. I’d go to friends’ houses and see big decorated trees with packages and hear about holiday gatherings. And I’d see trees through the windows of most every house I passed. To make matters worse, in my memory, Hanukkah hadn’t yet been transformed into a Jewish alterative to the excesses of Christmas. We did celebrate Hanukkah but, to be frank, it wasn’t the same. Notably, it spanned a week, usually one when the world, including school, continued at its normal pace. On Christmas, by contrast, everything stopped.
And, at least in my memory, the classic Jewish alternatives to Christmas -going to the movies, eating Chinese food, etc. – hadn’t taken root, at least in my family, which, to say the least, was not socially deft. Instead, like many Jewish families, we had a pared-down Christmas, where we might get one present (plus one or two at Hanukkah). But there were no services, no day-long family celebration, and no big extended family dinner.
Feeling left out, I carried out small acts of resistance. If my elementary school teachers (who were terrific) put up a Christmas tree, I would defiantly put a Jewish star on top of it. When we sang Christmas carols, I would never sing the word “Jesus” or “God” or anything else that might suggest I was affirming Christianity. (My older sister, or maybe my parents, asked our Rabbi, Morrison David Bial, whether it was ok for her to sing Christmas songs in the junior high school chorus. Being a good Reformed rabbi, he said she should think of it as great music and throw herself into it, which she did.)
As I grew older, I learned the classic coping mechanisms (Chinese food, movies, getting together with others who didn’t celebrate the holiday etc.). And then in the first decade of this century, my extended family would get together for about a week around Christmas somewhere on the Carolina coast. (The trips ended when my mother was no longer mobile.) Since several family members are good singers and others (like me) are willing to embarrass ourselves, we’d go caroling (which can be challenging in beach communities that are largely, but not entirely, deserted in late December).
While we didn’t make a traditional Christmas feast, we ate well on Christmas Day, and all the other nights-usually ending with a massive shrimp-fest overseen by my nephew Jacob Boehm, a talented chef even when he was quite young. My brother-in-law, two nephews, and, over time, some nephews-in-law, were the all-male crew that always cleaned and deveined the wild-caught shrimp we always used for these feasts. And, with time-and a marriage to an insightful therapist-I came to recognize that for those who observe it, Christmas can sometimes be fraught with underlying tensions, unspoken problems, and unresolved grievances.
This Christmas, of course, it’s just the two of us. We’ve spent much of the unusually windy and rainy day putting photos into albums – including pictures from those Carolina coastal trips, w- into actual photo albums. This has been poignant and made me reflect not only on past Christmases but also on the holiday, which brings me back to what I’ve learned about how and when the Post Office began issuing Christmas stamps.
For decades the Post Office had not issued a Christmas stamp, largely because of concerns that it would violate the First Amendment’s ban on establishing a state religion. By the early 1960s, it was receiving over 1,000 letters a year calling for such a stamp. Facing a growing budget deficit, postal officials decided to issue a 4-cent first-class stamp which they hoped would increase revenue by convincing people to use first-class mail for their Christmas cards instead of third-class mail, which cost 3 cents per card.
They checked to see if leaders of a variety of non-Christian religious groups would object. And apparently they didn’t object to the proposed stamp, which pictured a wreath and the words “Christmas 1962.”
The stamp was a hit. Even though the Post Office printed 500 million stamps, more than the first run for any previous stamp, the issue quickly sold out. The Post Office printed 500 million more and they sold out as well.it were printed (more than any single stamp up to that time). The Post Office wound up printing 1 billion copies of the stamp and it still sold out. Based on that success, the Post Office began to regularly issue Christmas-themed stamps.
A few people complained about the First Amendment and some complained that using the stamps to generate revenue for the Post Office was another sad example of how the meaning of Christmas was being overwhelmed by commercial concerns. But no one sued and for the next few years, the Post Office issued relatively secular annual Christmas stamps
However, in 1966, the Post Office issued both a “secular” stamp and a new “traditional” stamp, which featured a reproduction of Madonna and Child With Angels,” a painting by Hans Memling. Jewish groups and others protested that the Madonna stamp violated the First Amendment, but they didn’t sue to stop it.
In spring 1967, the Post Office announced it would issue would issue a new, larger Christmas stamp based on Memling’s depiction of the Madonna. In June 1967, a group called “Protestants and Other Americans United for Church and State,” sued to stop the stamp. C. Stanley Lowell, the group’s associate director, explained they did so because the stamp “is nothing in the world but a Roman Catholic stamp, portraying Mary enthroned as the Queen of Heaven, holding in her hand a Roman Catholic missal, a book of liturgy used only in the mass.”
In September 1967, a federal judge denied the group’s request for a restraining order and the stamp was issued. The Post Office has continued to issue Christmas stamps and starting in the 1990s, it also began issuing stamps for other religious holidays and end-of-year observances, including Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Eid, and the Chinese New Year.
While Christmas stamps are a settled issue, they can still be unsettling, as Susan Esther Barnes found a few years ago when she asked the grocery-store cashier for stamps and was given a packet with pictures of Santa and his reindeer. As she wrote on the Jewish Journal website: “I inquired hopefully, ‘Do you have any that aren’t Christmas stamps? I’m Jewish.’ Alas, the answer was, “Sorry, no.” She added: “If other people want to have Christmas stamps, Christmas Coca-Cola cans, and Christmas Oreos, that’s perfectly fine with me. But I don’t want them, and I don’t think they should be foisted on me against my will.”
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get some take-out Chinese food and then watch a movie. And tomorrow we’ll get back to work on those picture albums.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.