penny seals: giving, folded into the mail

holiday giving has worn a lot of outfits. one of the sweetest was a sticker the size of a stamp.

the clerk

• the u.s. postal service's history says a danish postal clerk, einar holboell, came up with the idea while sorting christmas cards in december 1903.
• the plan: sell a small sticker people could use to decorate holiday cards, and use the money to build a hospital for children with tuberculosis.
• denmark's julemærket says the first julemærke came out in 1904, from holbøll, a clerk at the købmagergade post office, and that one has been issued every year since.

not a stamp

these weren't postage. usps describes them as stamp look-alikes with no postage value, and says postal officials asked people not to stick them on the address side of envelopes. people often did anyway.

a tiny paper square that said: someone thought of someone.

across the atlantic

• in 1907, a small delaware sanatorium needed $300 or it would have to close. a doctor there told his cousin, a volunteer named emily bissell.
• bissell designed and printed holiday seals and sold them at the post office for a penny each.
• the red cross says the first supply sold out in two days. usps says more than $3,000 came in within a month, ten times the goal.
• the next year the seals went nationwide, and the red cross ran the program for 12 years before handing it over in 1919.

and the post office caught up

for decades people asked for real christmas postage. usps says its first christmas stamp came out in 1962.

wish sock has nothing to do with any organization named here, and isn't collecting money for anything. this post is history, nothing more.