First Day

 Among my many small pleasures in life, ranking up there with a cup of well-made coffee first thing in the morning, are US postage stamps.  Let us proclaim the beauty of a postage stamp!  They remain a wonder which has not yet been ruined by our government.  In other countries, stamps now have ugly bar codes, or even more lamentably, they have no stamps at all.  I recently learned from a German Postcrossing member that his local post office no longer sells standard postage stamps, but instead will issue a soulless print-on-demand barcode sticker to serve the same function.  No artwork, no photographic vista, no history, no character. So while they still exist, let us exalt the US postage stamp!  Few other countries can surpass the US in this area; it is truly something that makes America great.  Russia has some beautiful artistic stamps,  France's stamps are notably large, and Finland has always impressed me with the wide variety and innovation of their stamps.  But the US has always demonstrated inventiveness and creativity when issuing new stamps.  We have seen stamps of unconventional shapes, scratch and sniff stamps, and color-changing stamps.  An amazing amount of work goes into the creation of some stamps, an example of which is the documented design process of the stamps recently issued to commemorate the American Revolutionary War.  Given the fascinating detail contained within postage stamps (for those who take time to investigate it), one activity I often participate in is to collect First Day Of Issue covers for newly issued stamps.  For those not familiar, this is symbolic cancellation of a stamp on the first day it is made available for use.  Special and often elaborate postmarks are used on the occasion, which usually includes a formal unveiling ceremony at the geographic location and/or on the date that is significant to the subject matter of the new stamp.  I collect these ceremonial cancellations by sending (by mail in a covering envelope) self-addressed envelopes with the new stamps affixed.  They are given the FDOI cancellation, and are mailed back to me, usually in a plastic envelope with a cardboard stiffener so they arrive in pristine, collectable condition.  The process takes several weeks, so when I mail off the new covers, I've usually forgotten about them until the day they arrive, unexpected, in my mailbox.  Then it's like a little Christmas Day.  Yesterday was such a day, when I discovered a stack of cancelled FDOI covers in my mailbox.  This included stamps I'd sent off in batches over several prior weeks.  So I received the new freshwater fishing lures stamps (five different designs), the American Revolution Battlefields stamps (15 designs), and the commemorative Betty White Stamp.  I add these to my collection of FDOI covers that dates back over two decades.  While I have never considered myself a dedicated stamp collector -- my philately skills are largely undeveloped -- I do enjoy archiving practical examples of the tiny little wonders that are US postage stamps.