The History of the Christmas Seals

On a stormy night in December in 1903 a postman named Einar Holboell was sorting out piles of Christmas mail in the post office on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Pausing for a rest he looked out of the window and saw two little waifs, a ragged girl and boy, just before they disappeared into the swirling snow.

The contrasts between the expressions of goodwill mail and that of the forsaken looking children troubled him so much that perhaps the letters gave him the idea that if every letter and parcel carried an extra stamp, not costing anyone much, then that money from the tens of thousands of such stamps could be donated to help unfortunate children.

From this humble idea Einar Holboell and his fellow workers set about designing and printing the seals and explaining the idea to the public King Christian added a suggestion of his own – that the first issue of seals would have Queen Louise’s picture as a sign that he and his wife fully endorsed the idea, as they were both very popular with their people and this was a great help.

So Christmas of 1904 the seals went on sale and the campaign was even more successful than the postmen had hoped. Four million stickers were bought. It was decided that the children in most distress were the hundreds, even perhaps thousands, who were crippled by bone tuberculosis and tuberculosis of the spine. Funds from the first two Christmas seals campaigns started building town hospitals for treatment of children suffering from tuberculosis.

The double Red Cross (the Cross of Lorraine) was adopted as the International symbol of the crusade against tuberculosis in 1902 and appears on all seals throughout the World. In 1927 it was agreed that the Christmas seals campaign was to be the official method for Tuberculosis Associations to appeal to the public for funds. The seals have paid for millions of Australians to have chest x-rays or tuberculosis tests, and in this way thousands of cases have been found before the disease has spread to others.

Although tuberculosis in Australia is not currently the threat of life and health that it was 50 years ago, tuberculosis has not been eradicated in Australia, so this is no time to quit. Tuberculosis has been declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to be a Global Emergency.

Australians cannot afford to be complacent about this sometimes forgotten disease.