MY PERSONAL CHRISTMAS TRADITION

My Grandpa Joe started it 100 years ago!

There’s so much to love about Christmas. The music, the food, the charitable spirit and family traditions.

Growing up as one of only two Jewish families at Towers Elementary School in the 1960’s, Christmas was all around us. In the annual Christmas shows, my sister Nancy and I would frequently come on stage for the one Chanukah number, lighting the menorah and leading a song.

In the days before “Christmas Vacation” became “Winter Break” and “Merry Christmas” became “Happy Holidays,” we joyously celebrated Christmas along with our neighbors and friends. Dinner at my high school girlfriend Dorothy Schmidt’s house gave me the first chance in my life to taste goose and a few other holiday treats.

So it wasn’t awkward at all, when working with my grandfather Joseph Friedman on his stamp collection as a boy and young man, that once a year I’d watch him add Christmas Seals to his extensive international stamp collection.

The Christmas Seal idea is reported to have originated with Danish postal employee Einar Holvoell, who conceived the idea of selling labels to raise money for charity. Some Scandinavian post offices are reported to have sold the first Christmas Seals during the 1904 holiday season. In the United States, Emily Bissell read about the Danish labels and worked with other individuals and the Delaware Chapter of the American Red Cross to design and produce the first U.S. Christmas seals in 1907.

The following year, the Christmas Seal campaign went national, with the American National Red Cross issuing and selling the 1908 Christmas seals. Beginning in 1919, Christmas seals were produced and sold by the National Tuberculosis Association, now known as the American Lung Association, which distributes them to this day.

Christmas Seals are no longer sold but distributed free with requests for donations to the American Lung Association. I recall my Grandpa Joe writing a check for $15 every year to them in the return envelope that would arrive with his Seals.

Every year since I took over my grandfather’s collection, more than 45 years now, I have added the newly issued Christmas Seals to the same Elbe spring-back album he used when he started collecting close to 100 years ago. And I dutifully enclose a check to the American Lung Association in his memory.

Since Grandpa Joe had started collecting stamps and Christmas Seals in the late 1920’s, at the time I took over his collection there were some empty pages in his album, missing the issues between 1908 and 1918. It took me ten years to figure out that I should go backwards in the album to fill in the empty holes.

I responded to an ad in Linn’s Stamp News from a company that sold not only stamps to collectors, but old Seals as well. I sent a check, and the Christmas Seals arrived on a very auspicious day.

From my Journal, June 16, 1988:

Thursday. Took the day off from work so that I could escort Elfreda to a baby shower thrown by her coworkers at the Department of Water & Power. It was a lunchtime soiree attended by some 35 of her friends, and we received a lot of baby outfits for Joseph.

Seeing the big sign “Joseph Friedman’s ‘Coming Out’ Party” as we walked in, I was stirred to thinking how wonderful I feel perpetuating Grandpa Joe’s memory by naming our baby Joseph. It means so much to me, I get misty-eyed just thinking about it.

How remarkable it is, then, that on this same day, I received my purchase of old U.S. Red Cross Christmas Seals from the 1900’s and 1910’s. I now have a complete set dating back to the first Seals in 1907. How Grandpa ever got started with the Christmas Seals I don’t know, but it was probably because he and Grandma Belle made donations to the Lung Association, and the Seals were sent to them in return.

It felt great to put them in Grandpa’s Christmas Seals album, which once again, as happens every time I add stamps to all his albums, brings me right back to his old apartment on Catalina Ave. in Redondo Beach as a kid, sitting at his side at the dining room table, working on our stamp albums. I miss him so much and think of him every day.

Over the years I would take the Christmas Seals album into my places of work and show them to co-workers, as well as friends at home. People found them fascinating, and I have always been proud to share something that to me is historic, nostalgic, and in many instances, artistically beautiful.

If you are so inclined, go online and search for these little pieces of art. Or even better, send a donation to the American Lung Association and start receiving them by mail every year.

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