Sunday, December 5, 2021

Irish Christmas stamps invoke anger

December 25th, Christmas Day, a time for rejoicing for the entire Christian / Catholic world (some celebrate a week or so later, like in Georigia). Despite being Jewish and not celebrating Christmas, it is nice to see the spirit of Christmas and the many pretty stamps that are issued all over the world.

Ireland innocently brought out a set of stamps, or adhesive labels for Christmas 2021. The set includes four stamps for local postage with the words "Peace and Joy", "Naughty or Nice?", "Ho Ho Ho" and "Sending Hugs" and two stamps for international postage for "Nollaig Shona" (which means Merry Christmas in Gaelic Irish) "Love". It was the local stamps that invoked the ire of the public. Who would have thought that these stamps would have invoked such feelings?

The outrage began with a call to a popular program named Liveline where someone emailed them to pent his frustration at the choice, saying that the stamps used for Irish addresses were secular and didn’t include scenes from Jesus’ birth, such as the Nativity scene or anything that wasn't to his liking.

He made a claim that instead of the Nativity scene, local stamps had phrases such as ‘naughty or nice’, and ‘ho ho ho’. This was actually a part of the problem.



Other callers felt that the phrase ‘naughty or nice’ implies sex and another said that she didn’t want to send a Christmas card to her local priest with a naughty or nice stamp. The phrase ‘ho ho ho’ stamp together with the sexual implication of the naughty stamp concerned people about the possible innuendo.


"The national Christmas stamp range, which supposedly celebrates a major and very ancient Christian festival on December 25, is, as one caller said to Joe Duffy, effectively discriminatory, because if you want a religious stamp you have to pay extra."








4 comments:

  1. I think that the stamps creator was innocent and good. People will always complain (:

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  2. Indeed People do complain all the time ... that's how they think today. But to give it a positive view it is better then starting war for no matter what. And certainly not for a religious case
    Merry Xmas and joyfull 2022

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  3. Are they better or worse than the staple Christmas diet of Italian paintings of the birth of Christ so prevalent in Irish stamp design in past times? These stamps are decidedly naïve, whatever one thinks about the ambivalence of messages of hohoho, naughty or nice etc. And of course you cannot soak them off the envelope, in common with contemporary issues almost everywhere. Collecting used stamps is obviously a niche interest. A pity, because postmarks tell (or told) a story.
    Notice the 'N' and 'W'. Time was when you knew how much you were paying for a stamp. Nowadays you just get a nasty surprise when it comes to paying.

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