Operation Smile, Covenant House distribute new Christmas-themed BREs

Shriners Children’s Hospitals in August kicked off this year’s Christmas-themed business reply envelopes with a BRE featuring three stamp-sized designs printed on it, but last week’s check of my post office box turned up examples from a couple of other nonprofits.

The first came from Operation Smile. This bright yellow envelope has designs picturing a penguin wearing a winter cap and draped with strings of Christmas lights; the word “Hope”; and a Christmas tree.

The second envelope is from Covenant House. It’s a bit larger than average, and I suppose because of the extra space has five designs: a Christmas tree captioned “Joy”; Madonna and Child captioned “Love”; Santa Claus captioned “Believe”; A child and lamb captioned “Faith”; and children captioned “Hope”.

As I’ve written before, these aren’t stamps, and there’s probably little place for this sort of material in a typical stamp collection, but I have to admit these envelopes add some color to my incoming junk mail!

Published 2025-10-04