Saturday is the Lunar New Year. Lunar New Year is determined to be the day of new moon which falls between January 21 and February 20. In legend, Buddha felt the Chinese nation needed to be reorganized and he called all of the animals to a Lunar New Year's meeting. Only 12 of all of the invited beasts came to the meeting so Buddha decided to honor them by assigning a year to each of them in succession. We will be entering the year of the Rat and according to tradition people born in this year are energetic, charming, meticulous, sociable, persistent, humorous, honest, and jolly. (Traits most Westerners don't associate w/ rats.) First day of issue was February 8, 1996 in San Francisco, California. 93 million stamps were printed. Scott # 3060
Interestingly enough in 2006 this same stamp design was used for that Year of the Rat w/ only the denomination upped to 39 cents.
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