St Patricks Day

Above is a stamp featuring St. Patrick treading on snakes. Are you wondering why the stamp is set in blue and not green? Well, the truth is that St. Patrick was originally associated with blue! Over the years we have changed that to green and my guess is that it has something to do with the Shamrock legend. You see St. Patrick once used the 3-leafed shamrock to explain the holy trinity to the pagan Irish. Makes sense right?

While St. Patrick died in 461, it wasnt until the 1600s that it was made a holy day for Catholics. And even then it wasn't made an official public holiday in Ireland until 1903. And though St. Patricks Day is not an official holiday here in the states, it is still one of the most celebrated holidays in the country. As the saying goes, everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day!

St Patricks Day Re-mailing

So if you have been following this blog for a while you may have seen my post about the Valentine's day re-mailing. Well...this post is similar but it is St. Patricks Day based. If you aren't familiar with the re-mailing..basically you send your postcards/cards/letters with postage already on them...inside of another envelope addressed to the Postmaster of that particular post office.

When the cards reach their destination the lovely people at that post office will open the larger envelope...pull out the things you want re-mailed...and then postmark them and send them on to their destinations. Basically it is a way to get a neat holiday themed postmarks on your mail. Most people who do this are familiar with the Christmas re-mailing programs around the country (there are a TON for the Christmas holiday), so I thought I would write about the lesser known ones.

Here you can find a complete listing for the post offices that have St. Patrick's Day named post offices. I plan on sending some postcards to myself like I did for Valentine's Day so I can see which ones have the neatest postmarks. So keep your eyes peeled for pics of those in the coming weeks.

Remember when addressing it should look something like this:

Postmaster
St. Patrick's Day Re-mailing
(insert postoffice here)

Hope this is helpful. I wasn't able to find a deadline for this..but I bet we can assume it is before March 17th. =)