Christmas by kids.

These are the cheerful designs for Great Britain's Christmas stamps this year. There is also a range of Madonna & Child stamps available but these are the ones that seem to be grabbing the limelight.

There was a competition and children were invited to send in their designs. From thousands of entries these two were chosen. I find these so familiar but can't figure why. 

Illustrations from Royal Mail and available to buy from 5 November from them at this link.

Snow for Christmas and even less visible Freshwater Life

Wincor Font Type 2 What you'll find at Post Offices

Hytech Type 3 This is what was in Presentation Packs

Hytech Type 3a from Autumn Stampex 

There are now three variations of the Freshwater Life 3 Post and Gos. The usual two - type 3 ones you'll never see unless people break up their Presentation Packs and type 2 ones you might see if you're lucky to have friends or clients who use Post and Gos and then there's the very rare variety, type 3a, which someone could only have obtained on a couple of days at an exhibition.

I have just shown singles above to make it clear what the font and layout differences are. The Presentation Pack strip is 6 x 1st Class and was illustrated in my last post.

2nd Large finally appear in booklets with MA13 and F codes.

Some M12L Code Ts from Walsall books have been found with a really snowy print, very obvious on closer view as the illustration below shows.

The De La Rue 2nd counter sheet belatedly gets the MA13 code too. You would have thought this one would have been needed ages ago but perhaps people stocked up heavily on the MA12s and are only now going back to ask for more.