Point Wilson Light, WA

Postcard US-4002452 to Luxembourg shows the Point Wilson Light, an active aid to navigation overlooking the entrance to Admiralty Inlet, located in Fort Worden State Park near Port Townsend, Jefferson County, Washington. Built in 1914, the lighthouse was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 24, 1971.

Moominppapa at Sea

Postcard FI-2342261 from Finland shows an illustration of Tove Marika Jansson (August 9, 1914 – June 27, 2001), a Swedish-speaking Finnish author and illustrator from Moominppapa at Sea.

With her first book of the semi-autobiographical Bildhuggarens dotter (Sculptor's Daughter) in 1968, she had published six novels and five books of short stories for adults. However, in the PostCrossing world, she is best known for the Moomin cards with illustrations from her Moomin books for children.

The first Moomin book The Moomins and the Great Flood was published in 1945. However, it wasn't until the next two books, Comet in Moominland (1946) and Finn Family Moomintroll (1948), when Moomins gained a great deal of popularity.

Moomins had lived in Moominvalley for a while, until the family decided that they needed a change and moved to a lighthouse on a tiny island. In this Volume 7 of Moomins, "they find space to grow, and to do things they couldn't in their comfortable, cluttered valley home. As they discover their new home, the family also discover surprising, and wonderfully funny, new things about themselves."

Tove Jansson won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1966 for her contribution as a children's writer.

Santa in an Airship High Over the Panama Canal

A wrong number listed on a Colorado Springs newspaper advertisement by Sears started NORAD's Santa Tracking program in 1955. Google also started to track Santa's movement in 2004 as a Google Maps service. However, the radar tracking may reveal Santa is not on a sleigh after all, as the vintage postcard US-3141511 from Virginia shows that Santa Claus on an airship overlooks the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.

Today in History: the Name of Saint Petersburg Restored in 1991

Postcard RU-2915679 from Russia shows the Grand Peterhof Palace near Saint Petersburg, Russia. Saint Petersburg is the second largest city in Russia, located on the Neva River estuary where the river meets the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. 

The city started as Tsar Peter the Great built the Peter and Paul Fortress on May 27, 1703. After the beginning of World War I, Saint Petersburg was renamed to Petrograd, meaning "Peter's City", to remove the German words Sankt and Burg on September 1, 1914. 

Petrograd was renamed as Leningrad on January 26, 1924, five days after Vladimir Lenin's death. Lenin led the October Revolution that stormed the Winter Palace on November 7, 1917 (October 25, 1917 in old style date), marking the rise of the Communist Party. The city has more than 200 places associated with the life and activities of Lenin. 

The city restored its name back to Saint Petersburg on September 9, 1991, after a referendum upon the name of the city on June 12, 1991. 

In the United States, the city St. Petersburg in Florida, incorporated on February 29, 1892, was named after Saint Petersburg, Russia, hometown of one of its co-founders Peter Demens, The legend had that Peter Memens won the naming right by a coin toss. 

Systems at Work

During my trip to Washington D.C., I managed a brief late afternoon visit to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum near the Union Station. The museum was established through a joint agreement between the United States Postal Service and the Smithsonian Institution. It opened in 1993. The building housing the museum was constructed in 1914 and had served as the Main Post Office of Washington D.C. until 1986.

Although the museum is small when compared to its Smithsonian cousins, it houses many interactive displays about the history of the United States Postal Service, and the history of mail service and stamp collections around the world. Among them, "Systems at Work" leads visitors through 10 different periods and reveals the evolution of the postal system in the U.S. over time. You can participate simulated postal activities by tossing packages into mail pouches as mail clerks did in 1917, keying letters on a computerized version of a multiple position letter-sorting machine operated in 1968, or scanning barcodes using handheld intelligent mail devices.

My favorite part was to gather cancellation marks from various eras on a postcard.

The admission is free. For those who can't attend in person, you can visit the online version on the web.