Sparkling Holidays Forever First Class Postage Stamps

Haddon Sundblom is the reason the modern Santa looks the way he does - warm, heavyset, red-suited, more grandfather than saint. These four portraits are cropped from larger paintings of his that ran as Coca-Cola advertisements from the 1940s into the early 1960s. Sold in booklets of 20.

They go out with Christmas cards, and the practical argument for them is that the cards go out by the hundred. A booklet of 20 is one small list; most households buying these buy several. Because they are Forever stamps, anything left over in January is not wasted - each one still covers a one-ounce letter at the current 82¢ rate, whenever you get round to using it. That is worth knowing if you have ever thrown out half a book of dated holiday stamps. Businesses that send seasonal cards to clients tend to buy these rather than a generic issue, since a Sundblom Santa reads as traditional rather than corporate.