Feeling festive?

I was deputed by the boy yesterday to buy some religious Christmas stamps. Over here in UK-land, if you ask for Christmas stamps at the post office, you get whatever secular stamps are on offer that year (Wallace and Gromit, Rudolph, Father Christmas). But did you know that you can also get religious Christmas stamps, but that you have to specifically ask for them? I didn't until the boy (the USA born boy) told me a couple of years ago. So, off I went to support the concept of religious Christmas stamps, quite aware that I no longer knew how much stamps cost. The last time I could say with any certainty what the price of a 2nd class stamp was, it was 19p, and that was some time (one might almost say decades) ago. So I fully expected a 2nd class stamp to cost about what I thought a first class stamp might now cost. No, nowhere near. On the other hand, I have made a serious investment in easily lost, slightly sticky pieces of paper.