WASHINGTON — The Postal Service is offering relief from the summer heat with a sneak peek at its cool 2012 Holiday Celebration Santa and Sleigh Forever stamps through social media.

Using social media to reach broader, more diverse audiences is an initiative that began last week to engage more interest in stamp collecting. Select stamps from the 2012 commemorative program will be previewed one at a time throughout the summer.

“These cheerful stamps portray Santa Claus flying through the air in his sleigh,” said Stephen Kearney, manager, Stamp Services. “With a cargo of toys and gifts produced in his workshop by elves, he lands on the rooftop of house after house and slides down the chimney to leave presents for girls and boys of all ages. Santa’s annual journey is joyfully captured in this block of four holiday stamps, with two rows of two stamps each presenting a classic image of Santa and his reindeer circling around snow-covered rooftops.”

Artist Paul Rogers of Pasadena, CA, worked with art director Howard Paine of Delaplane, VA, to create these holiday stamps. The computer-generated images were originally drawn in pencil on paper.

Customers may preview the stamps on Facebook at facebook.com/USPSStamps, through Twitter @USPSstamps or on the website Beyond the Perf at beyondtheperf.com/2012-preview. Beyond the Perf is the Postal Service’s online site for back stories on upcoming stamp subjects, first-day-of-issue events and other philatelic news.

Stamps previewed thus far on social media include the Cherry Blossoms Centennial, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Love Ribbons, John H. Johnson, Bicycling and Celebrating Lunar New Year: Year of the Tiger.

The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.

We’re everywhere so you can be anywhere: www.uspseverywhere.com

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A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, 150 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes. The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. We’re everywhere so you can be anywhere: www.uspseverywhere.com. With 32,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $67 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 29th in the 2010 Fortune 500. Black Enterprise and Hispanic Business magazines ranked the Postal Service as a leader in workforce diversity. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency six consecutive years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.