It’s barely pumpkin spice season, and sweater weather has yet to take over, but the U.S. Postal Service is making sure that those who look forward to sending holiday cards are covered. The 2024 “Holiday Joy” Forever stamps are being released.
The Holiday Joy collection is the result of a collaboration between Antonio Alcalá, an art director for the USPS stamp development program, and an artist from the West Coast, Michelle Muñoz.
Alcalá spoke to WTOP from his studio in Northern Virginia.
The set of stamps includes two with ornaments, one with a poinsettia and another with floral elements that he said “evoke a snowflake.”
Designing the works of art for a small canvas — the size of a first-class stamp — can be tricky. He said one of the designs he and Muñoz worked on had to be shelved because, “It looked a little bit too much like a honeybee with wings as opposed to an ornament, so we had to start over and revise that particular design.”
Alcalá said he does get a kick out of seeing his own stamps on cards and letters, and enjoys selecting stamps for his own correspondence, choosing a stamp that he feels may be especially meaningful to the recipient. It can still be hard to grasp that his designs are available not just at his local post office in Northern Virginia, but that “these are available everywhere in the country from Maine to Florida to Alaska and California. It’s just an amazing feeling.”
The volume of mail handled by the U.S. Postal Service has shrunk: “It’s no secret that the amount of first-class mail has declined in the same sort of ratio as the number of emails that find their way into your inbox have increased,” he said.
But, Alcalá said, the stamps are produced in numbers no lower than 10 million.
“I know when we issue a stamp, there’s going to still be millions of people using them on their mail throughout the country,” said Alcalá.
Alcalá has also noticed what he calls a “resurgence” of correspondence through the USPS, especially among younger letter writers.
“Because it is a very personal, emotional sort of thing to get a piece of mail from a loved one, a friend, a relative, slipped through your mail slot or put in your mailbox,” he said.
Along with the Holiday Joy collection of Forever stamps, a new “Madonna and Child” stamp is being released.
A special dedication ceremony is being held at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum at 2 Massachusetts Avenue NE at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday morning.
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