675FDCS

As we are slowly (!) edging towards the winter, anticipation before Christmas becomes more and more prominent, and while Christmas carols have yet to resound through the alleys of your favourite supermarket, here and there we see shops starting to sell Christmas decorations and THE major ingredient for successful Christmas preparations : Christmas biscuits!

The baking of biscuits (or piparkökur, as they are called in Icelandic) is an essential pastime in many an Icelandic home before Christmas.
Families get together to spend afternoons drinking hot spiced chocolate and baking biscuits or even making their own gingerbread houses!

The artfully decorated gingerbread comes in all sorts of shapes, colours and sizes. Christmas is a family time, and most people find that spending time with their children and close relatives is the best and most precious gift one could wish for at that time of year. 

Designed by artist Elsa Nielsen, the 2018 Christmas stamps from Iceland are a treat both to the eyes and the nose 🙂

Both stamps show illustrations of piparkökur : stamp 675A (the domestic stamp) shows a biscuit shaped like a Christmas tree while the biscuit on stamp 675B (to Europe) is shaped like a star. And for the pleasure of all, both stamps are scented with specially scented ink and emit a delicate fragrance of newly baked gingerbread biscuits! Yum yum!

675A – domestic

675B – To Europe

Issue: 675A-B self-adhesive
Design: Elsa Nielsen
Printer: Cartor Security Printing
Process: Offset Litho
+ ginger biscuit scented ink
Price: 50g domestic (180 ISK)
50g to Europe (225 ISK)
Issue date: 01.01.2018

These festive stamps as well as other philatelic goodies like first day covers, issue 674 and the 2018 stamp year pack and FDC pack are available to pre-order from our  webstore as of now 🙂

You can also order them at the address stamps@stamps.is or by phone at : 00354-580-1050 from 9am-4pm Icelandic time 

 PS : Elsa Nielsen has been designing stamps regularly for Iceland Post over the years. Among others, in 2017 she was the designer of the very popular stamp 647A – Icelandic sweater, the Icelandic Sepac stamp 2017 which came 2nd in the 2017 Most beautiful Sepac stamp competition 🙂