Postage Stamps

When I first looked at this puzzle image, I thought it looked fun. Lots of specific images. Lots of words. My strategy for putting this puzzle together appeared to be fairly straight forward. 

On closer inspection, though, I realized this is the same set of stamps repeated on different colored backgrounds. It wasn't a different set of stamps - different images - on each background. So, what's the new strategy? We started by sorting the background color. Gold first because all the edges of the gold could be seen. It was front and center. That section went together fairly smoothly. A puzzle within a puzzle.

After that, it got tricky. Do we sort by shape? By color? Neither of those strategies worked.

I ended up making piles of stamps of a single design. We matched up the stamp parts first so we could place sections instead of individual pieces. Then Dale and I made heavy usage of the image on the box top to figure out which color background went where. There were four shades of red, at least three green, at least three blacks and some blue. It was tricky, though, and the process was slow.

I began with this set of four stamps because the bold illustration in red, green and black stood out and we could combine several pieces together to form a relatively large section that we could place.

Then I worked with the mailboxes

and the Santas. That got the ball rolling.

This is one of those puzzles that took too much brainwork to be fun for me at the end of a long day. I'm glad it was only 500 pieces.

Holiday Traditions is a puzzle from the U.S. Postal Service and published in 1997. The cardboard pieces were thick and sort of spongy. They didn't click together well, so we weren't quite confident on the fit. 

As a puzzle, I wouldn't recommend it. As a piece of postage history, the illustrations are extremely cool. It's fun to see Christmas stamps from way back when a first class postage stamp was five cents. I can remember that from my childhood!