Year of the Snake

I have had lots of new things shifting my focus from blogging over the past few weeks (in a good way - hello Jake! hello turkish lessons! hello ridiculous notion of training for fun runs!), but on this sweltering hot night in Melbourne, I thought I would get back into it and participate in this week's Sunday Stamps. The theme this Sunday is related to the Chinese New Year, which on Feb 10 ticked over to being the year of the Snake. I've got a sneaking suspicion the Year of the Snake is going to be awesome.

I haven't picked up my 2013 Chinese zodiac "year of the snake" stamps as yet, but I do have the 2012 version, which marked the year of the Dragon. I think in a way the Christmas Island Chinese zodiac stamps, which are a regular issue for Australia Post, are quite similar to the Chinese series of stamps which I have previously blogged about here (and are shown below):

The scans didn't work so well, but the Christmas Island stamps feature gold embossing; the characters aren't black as they look in the picture.

The 2010 version for the year of the tiger is also pretty cool:

I think it is pretty clever typography to turn the Chinese symbol into the character, with the tail swish in the 2012 Dragon stamp, and the hairy claw in the 2010 tiger stamp. I am definitely looking forward to getting my hands on the Year of the Snake stamps at some stage soon.