On December 30th 2025 the Danish Postal Service will deliver its last letter.
The Danish Postal Service is one of the oldest centralized mail delivery systems in the world, created by a decree by King Christian IV on December 1st, 1624, so it has been a little over 400 years since mail delivery began in Denmark!
Stamp issued in 1924 to mark 300 years of postal service in Denmark.
And soon it will end.
As a lifelong stamp collector — who actually was born and grew up in Denmark — it is rather bittersweet and sad news. Denmark now joins Iceland as one of the countries that no longer prints postage stamps.
I should clarify here that the Danish Postal Service "no longer delivering letters" doesn't mean that you cannot send a letter to Denmark anymore, it merely means that mail delivery now falls into the hands of various private organizations rather than a branch of the Danish government.
That said, it's still a sad day from the perspective of being a stamp collector.
As a kid, I remember the excitement of going to the post office whenever new stamps were issued, and watching for them to show up in our mail at home. My dad would also bring home business mail from his office, so it was quite easy to build a collection with very little money.
Denmark's first stamp was issued in 1851.
I would even ride my bike to one of the larger post offices in our area in late afternoon because I knew they had lots of PO boxes there, and people would read their mail while standing in the post office and then throw away the envelopes — which had stamps on them — and I could sometimes fish as many as 50-100 stamps out of the garbage bins.
I don't think you were supposed to actually do that, but I did anyway and I never got caught! Or, if somebody did notice me looking in the wastepaper bins they didn't do anything about it because it was a little kid working on his stamp collection!
The decision to shut down letter service from the official post office has been in the making for a number of years, as the volume of actual snail mail in Denmark has declined by more than 90% in the last 20 years. The Postal Service had already been closing all the walk-in post offices the last one shut down in 2017 replacing them instead with postal counters and kiosks in convenience stores and supermarkets.
A modern Danish stamp.
Sometimes I can't help but feel that my favorite collecting hobby — which I have enjoyed for over 50 years — is slowly becoming obsolete. Perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement because people collect lots of things that are no longer relevant and some of them are even gaining popularity simply from a nostalgia perspective, such as music on vinyl, vintage toys, old gaming consoles and so forth.
But the landscape has certainly changed a lot.
When I was a teenager, the city of Copenhagen — and most other cities around Europe and in many other parts of the world — had literally dozens of stamp collector hobby shops where you could go in and buy stamps and albums for your collections, and many places would have a "junior stamp box" and youngsters (such as myself and a couple of buddies) could actually spend an entire day just bicycling from one shop to another to find new stamps for our collections, out of a big bin of loose stamps that cost a penny apiece.
A Danish stamp from my childhood years.
Sometimes we'd even find something "good" that had escaped the stamp dealer's eye, and it was a bit like going treasure hunting!
Virtually every town and suburb had a "stamp club" that usually also had a junior division, and chances were that at least 1/4 to 1/3 of your friends in school also had a stamp collection so you would get together and trade stamps.
Looking back at some of the historical records — to the extent that they were kept — it was estimated that as many as 40 million people in the US collected stamps in the 1970s. That was, at the time, close to 15% of the entire population!
Naturally, I'm not going to give up collecting stamps but I do feel like the hobby is gradually sliding into the arena of "esoterica", supported by a smaller and smaller group of core supporters. What will happen to the hobby once people of my generation pass on from this plane of existence remains to be seen. Will those who grew up in the era of e-mail, and who perhaps never sent an actual letter end up collecting stamps? Would you collect something you really didn't grow up with? Or will the whole hobby simply disappear, and the rarities that once opon a time were collected considered "priceless" simply become another small piece of paper in some landfill?
I certainly hope not!
Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your weekend!
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Created at 2025.12.20 17:54 PST
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