Yet another holiday season is here in which we spend copious amounts of time standing in post office lines mailing off huge things. Every year I am more and more amazed to see how unattractive the religious Christmas stamps are. This year's pick: the Madonna of the Carnation by Bernardino Luini, painted circa 1515, is like every other Renaissance oil painting that gets chosen each year to represent the religious side of Christmas. Yes, I know the tradition of the Madonna and Child is a revered classic. But medieval paintings make Christianity appear as though it's permanently stuck 500 years back. Other religions: especially the attractive blue Eid stamp and the blue-and-yellow artfully drawn dreidel stamp for Hanukkah, get tasteful depictions of what their religion stands for in the 21th century. (Although the Eid stamp is totally out of season now that the Muslim holiday has rotated to September and won't be anywhere near Christmas time for at least two more decades. )

Usually the secular Christmas stamps are done pretty well but this year's "holiday knits" stamp takes new awards for ugliness. Who dreams up these designs?

Would someone at the U.S. Postal Service have the guts to commission a 21st century Mother and Child that most of the stamp-buying public could actually relate to? I have nothing against 16th-century art. While in college, I studied in France and spent months wandering through museums in Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice and many other places. What I really cottoned to were the bright 20th-century tapestries of the Apocalypse by Frenchman Jean Lurcat. He took at 2,000-year-old idea and made it something that 19-year-old me (at the time) could relate to.

Presenting a more modern depiction of the Madonna and Child would surely be controversial; something the postal service avoids by choosing Renaissance classics. But it would engage a public weary of Santa Claus and seeking the true meaning of of the holiday.

— Julia Duin, assistant national editor/religion, The Washington Times