By Charles Snee
The U.S. Postal Service will launch its third series of Lunar New Year commemorative stamps on January 11, when it will issue a forever unnamed stamp (55 ¢) celebrating the Year of the Rat.
An official first-day ceremony is scheduled for 11 a.m. (PST) at the Lunar New Year Festival in downtown Monterey Park, California, to be held on Garvey Avenue, between Garfield Avenue and the Alhambra.
No registration is required at the ceremony, which is free and open to the public. Luke Grossmann, senior vice president of finance and strategy at USPS, will serve as the dedicating officer.
Veteran USPS art director Antonio Alcala designed the stamp, which includes a three-dimensional ceremonial mask by Camille Chew.
Several symbols associated with Lunar New Year celebrations appear on Chew’s rat mask.
According to the postal service, the mask “recalls the elaborately decorated masks used in the dragon dance, a hallmark of Lunar New Year’s parades.”
Blue, shown in different shades of the mask, is said to be a lucky color for people born during the Year of the Rat, which begins this year on January 25 and ends on February 11, 2021. .
“The yellow motif on the rat’s head, similar to a crown, highlights the importance of the animal’s position as the first of the 12 signs of the animal zodiac associated with the lunar calendar. A touch of red [below each ear of the rat], another lucky color, links the design with other common celebratory decorations, ”the Postal Service said.
Patterns based on Asian fabrics are visible on the mask. The circle in the middle of the rat’s head symbolizes the new moon heralding the beginning of the lunar new year. Specifically, the lunar new year begins the second new moon after the December winter solstice.
“Lunar New Year” and “Forever USA” are printed in red and yellow, respectively, under the mask.
The postal service ordered a print run of 24 million stamps (1.2 million panels out of 20) from Banknote Corporation of America, one of the two contract printers at the USPS.
A combination of offset printing and gold leaf stamping was used to print the Rat of the Year stamp.
The lunar new year traditionally heralds the beginning of spring. As such, those celebrating in the United States mark the occasion by tidying up their streets and homes and hanging decorations.
For nearly three decades, the postal service has issued stamps to recognize the Lunar New Year, known as the Spring Festival in China and the Tet in Vietnam. Colored stamps, with their rich symbolism, are very popular among collectors of Asian descent.
The first series of lunar New Year stamps in the United States began with a 29 ¢ stamp issued on December 30, 1992, which sounded like the year of the rooster (Scott 2720).
That number marked the debut of the American label of designer Clarence Lee, a Chinese-American graphic artist based in Honolulu, Hawaii. Lee went on to design the remaining 11 stamps in the series, which concluded with the 37 ¢ Year of the Monkey stamp issued on January 13, 2004 (Scott 3832).
Nearly a year later, on January 6, 2005, Lee’s 12 Lunar New Year stamp designs were issued on a 24 ¢ 37-sided 24-sided panel (Scott 3895), with each design appearing. twice on the panel. The designs were once again used in a 12-stamp panel of 39 ¢ issued on January 29, 2006 (3997).
A new twelve-year lunar calendar cycle began with the year of the rat in 2008. Because of this, the postal service chose not to issue a lunar New Year stamp in 2007.
For its second Lunar New Year series that began in 2008, the USPS partnered with Kam Mak of Brooklyn, New York, who provided illustrations for Ethel Kessler’s designs.
Unlike the first 12 stamps designed by Lee, which focus on animals, the second series gives prominence to the different ways people celebrate the Lunar New Year.
The painting of a group of Mak red lanterns appears on the first stamp of the second Lunar New Year series, a 41 ¢ commemorative (Scott 4221) issued January 9, 2008 in San Francisco, California.
In a subtle homage to the first Lunar New Year series, each stamp in the second series features a small reproduction of Lee’s artwork of the animal associated with that year on the lunar calendar.
The 41 ¢ Year Rat stamp of 2008, the cut paper rat appears in the upper left, just above the kanji character of “rat” or “mouse.”
For the Rat of the Year 2021 stamp, two official postage stamps from the first day will be available at the postal service. Both the black and digital postage stamp include Chew’s ceremonial rat mask.
On the black postage stamp, the mask is depicted in a simplified way, without most of the intricate design details. The colored postage stamp represents the mask as it appears on the stamp.
Cancellation applications for the first day of the Year of the Rat 2021 must be sealed before May 11th.
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