I am excited about the upcoming week for a number of reasons, several of which are fairly non-philatelic. Sunday the 25th marks the official beginning of the Lunar New Year, the second of three New Years which are enthusiastically celebrated in my adopted home of Phuket, Thailand. There is a Chinese clan shrine just a few steps from my front-door and I anticipate a long night of hourly fireworks explosions. This leads to about a week of New Years festivities which is immediately followed by one of my favorite local events: the annual Old Town Phuket Festival with plenty of great food and music in this UNESCO City of Gastronomy.
Another occurrence at the start of Week 4 (19 January) is that my hometown American football team Kansas City Chiefs (I lived there from 1977 until the mid-1990s) is hosting the Tennessee Titans (I lived in Nashville from 1973 to 1977) in the final NFL playoff game before the championship Super Bowl. The Chiefs played an amazing game last Sunday against the Houston Texans (I was born in Texas in 1965) and I am extremely proud of both the team and the city. Also, their team colors of gold and red will create a double-Chinese New Year spectacle. The Chiefs made it onto one U.S. stamp (Scott #3188l), mentioned by name in the printing on the gummed side of one of the Celebrate the Century issues in 1999.
I have been working hard all week (well, all year thus far) to have timely updates on the many new stamps and to make this site as useful as I can. A new addition is the inclusion of special postmarks. I will report on these in a monthly manner, updating entity-based posts as I obtain more information. I realize that it will never be as extensive as the stamp listings but the pursuit is a bit part of the fun for me. Often, information comes from unexpected sources and each day brings something new and different.
It is never boring…
The Stamps of 2020: Week Four
20 January 2020
- Japan — Lunar New Year: Year of the Rat
- Russia — Discovery of Antarctica Bicentennial
21 January 2020
- Alderney — Fish and Sealife in the RAMSAR Area
- Alderney — Alderney Birds (Definitives)
- Australia — Tree-Dwellers of the Tropics
- Austria — Salzburg Festival Anniversary
- Great Britain — Video Games
- Guernsey — Ludwig van Beethoven 250th Birth Anniversary (Part 1)
22 January 2020
- Austria — Accession to EU 25th Anniversary
- Austria — Austrian Inventions — Radio Guidance System by Hedy Lamarr
- Finland — Valentine’s Day: Friendship
- Finland — Mannerheim League for Child Welfare Centenary
- Finland — Moomin: Protection of the Baltic Sea
23 January 2020
- Ireland — European Capitals of Culture 2020: Galway and Rijeka
- Japan — Greetings: Flowers
- United States — Love Made of Hearts
24 January 2020
- French Polynesia — Lunar New Year: Year of the Rat
- North Korea — Flowers and Trees
25 January 2020
- Estonia — Lunar New Year: Year of the Rat
- Wallis & Futuna — Lunar New Year: Year of the Rat