Sunday Stamps: Spring, Easter

Today's Sunday Stamps theme is 'Easter or Spring'.

To me the two are related: Easter is the celebration of the awakaning of nature after winter and the new life.

In our country crocuses are one of the first clear signs of this wake-up, this new life. Even though they not have been native in the Netherlands until 1560, nowadays bunches of crocuses pop up in the parks and lawns. Well, before crocuses snowdrops are marking the end of winter already, be it that snowdrops are seen less often.

Recently PostNL issued stamp sheets by the Dutch illustrator Janneke Brinkman-Salentijn. On one of the sheets I spotted this yellow crocus:



This stamp I used for my postcard to John in the UK, writing on the back that the yellow crocus is less common than the white and lilac ones. But since I posted the postcard I'm seeing yellow crocuses almost everywhere!

After crocuses, usually narcissus, daffodils, appear. Also these already are appearing in real now.

The Belarus Post issued this fine stamp, showing this typical spring flower:



Besides spring flora, there also is some spring fauna, which (coincidentally?) also is associated with Easter celebrations.
Among them the rabbit, here on stamps from Belarus:



And baby chicks, here a chick with its mom and dad on a beautiful stamp from Indonesia:



Stamps showing lambs I couldn't find so far. Instead I found three easter stamps, received thanks to postcrossing in the past years:

From Poland this Easter Bunny, with all well-known spring/easter items in it:



A more beautiful image, showing this stamp on the first day cover, you can see at Ana's blog post of today.

The following Easter stamp is from Ukraine. The text, 'Христос воскрес' (if I can read it well enough and as far as I can decipher thanks to translate.google), in Dutch would mean 'Vrolijk Paasfeest', 'Happy Easter', however the Ukrainan meaning literally is 'Christ resurrected'.
The fact that the largest image is an egg shaped figure might make the circle round for Easter being not only a Christian celebration but also a celebration of new life from even ancient times.



Eggs are not only used in Easter traditions. Painted eggs are also part of the Persian New Year celebrations, Now Ruz, which started a week ago, exactly at the start of spring.
The following stamp I alas don't own myself, but this picture I found on the internet, showing beautifully painted eggs:



Finally a basket with unpainted eggs, which hopefully will be hatched to have young chicks come out.
Also this stamp is from Poland. Google.translate told me that 'Wilkanoc' means Easter in Polish:



See more Spring and Easter stamps on today's Sunday Stamps blog post and via the links mentioned under that post.