Vatican Stamps in honor of Christmas

For Christmas 2025, the Vatican City State’s Postal and Philatelic Service has issued two postage stamps featuring details from the Adoration of the Shepherds, a monumental tapestry produced between 1524 and 1531 by the Flemish workshop of Pieter van Aelst, after a cartoon by the New School of Raphael.

The €1.30 stamp reproduces a detail showing a group of shepherds in adoration, portrayed with expressions of wonder and devotion typical of traditional Nativity iconography. In his final homily last Christmas, Pope Francis chose words especially fitting to the subject depicted here—of which a copy was displayed behind him at the moment of the opening of the Holy Door—likening the People of God to those very shepherds who were the first to receive the announcement of salvation, describing them as “pilgrims in search of truth.”

The €1.35 stamp focuses on the central scene: Saint Joseph points the shepherds toward the newly born Child, who at the same time reaches out to receive his mother’s embrace; Mary is shown laying the Child in the manger, as recounted in the Gospel of Luke, long regarded as the primary source for Christmas imagery. From the infant’s body emanates a light that illuminates the entire scene, a clear symbolic reference to the divinity of Christ as the “light of the world,” according to a tradition deeply rooted in Sacred Scripture. One need only recall the prophecy of Malachi, dating to the 5th century BC (“the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its rays”), or that spoken by Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, a few months before the birth of Jesus (“the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness”).

Also included within the composition are the ox and the donkey, indispensable elements in traditional representations of the Nativity, though more for their symbolic value than for fidelity to the Gospel accounts, where they are not mentioned. Pope Benedict XVI, in his essay on the infancy of Jesus, identified the two animals as representing a humanity lacking understanding that, before the Child, comes to knowledge.

The Christmas stamps are available individually and also mounted in a booklet format and in a large-format folder produced in a limited and numbered edition, containing two illustrated envelopes with postage and a special cancellation produced expressly for this occasion.