Have you been to our little town of Bethlehem? It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it affair in Caroline County, Md., just east of the Choptank River along Dover Bridge Road. For some folks, it’s a Delmarva pilgrimage site come Christmastime. They want to send out holiday cards bearing that “Bethlehem” postmark.
The tradition dates back nearly a century–to the late 1930s, when a 16-year-old girl named Marjorie Ann Chambers launched a community-minded project. She’d read a story about how some other towns called Bethlehem, along with the towns like Santa, Idaho and Christmas, Florida, had arranged to sell special seasonal postal “cachets” that appealed to stamp collectors and the general public alike.
Marjorie Ann got with the local postmaster and made it happen. Then she took out ads in stamp-collecting magazines. It was a big hit right from the get-go–and the tradition proved to be a keeper. In the 1980s the Bethlehem post office, which did a sleepy 50 pieces of mail on a normal day, was doing 3,000 a day during the Christmas season. The post office was citing that same number as of a few years ago, so it’s still going strong.
I’ve never done this with our cards, but my understanding is that inside the post office customers can stamp the back of their envelopes with an image of the three wise men journeying under a star. Only after that do they drop cards off to get that Bethlehem postmark.
The U.S. Postal Service says there are about 100 towns in the country who offer special holiday postmarks. The Christmas ones include Antler, N.D.; Nazareth, Texas; Snowflake, Ariz.; and Wiseman, Ark., among other.
–posted by Jim Duffy for Whimbrel Creations LLC/Secrets of the Eastern Shore in December 2025.
• Pictured in the collage up top here is Bethlehem postmaster Jim Christopher and Marjorie Ann herself. The collage first appeared in a Baltimore Sun article in 1939.
• If you’d like to read or watch more about this tradition, there’s this article from a Boston newspaper. CBS News did this story in 2019. Here’s a video from WJZ in Baltimore and another video from Chesapeake Bay Magazine out of Annapolis.
