Bethlehem, CT: The Town That Rallied Around Tradition and Community

Over the past 80 years, because of the direct association between the town’s name and the genesis of the holiday, the world has come to know the town of Bethlehem as “Christmas Town.”

Every year, residents of Connecticut and visitors alike choose from 85 different Christmas-themed cachets available at the Bethlehem Post Office to decorate their holiday correspondence. These designs are brought to life by local artists, students from local schools, and employees of the U.S. Postal Service.

The town’s post office serves about 1,628 households across its rural delivery and post office box services. But typically, the post office’s busiest month is December, when post office officials estimated that it becomes one of the busiest and most popular facilities in the entire Nutmeg State.

Around that time of year, Postmasters in Bethlehem receive Christmas cards and letters daily with requests for the postmasters to decorate the cards with the cachet designs. Those are then processed and delivered to friends and relatives of the senders from around the world.

“The desire to have Christmas cards cacheted and cancelled with a Bethlehem postmark has reached out to 50 states and as many as 11 countries during a typical Christmas season,” town officials wrote in an entry on the post office’s website.

Newly elected Bethlehem First Selectman Ray Butkus said Christmas time is special in the town.

“We proudly wear the moniker of Christmas Town, so it has special meaning to not just me as first selectman, but to all the citizens of Bethlehem,” he noted. “It is, as one of our citizens once said to me at Christmas, Bethlehem could be a scene from a Hallmark movie.”

The tradition dates back to 1938, when Postmaster Earl Johnson designed the first Christmas cachet at Bethlehem Post Office.

“Now that tradition has continued to this day, and there are many, many stamps,” Butkus said. “We have people from all over the country, indeed, all over the world, visit the town to get their Christmas cards stamped. That was really the genesis of the ‘Christmas Town’ name.”

The tradition has even inspired New York Times best-selling authors to incorporate elements of the Christmas Town into their novels. Martha Hall Kelly, a Massachusetts-born novelist wrote in her blog about the influence of Bethlehem’s post office tradition in her novel “Lilac Girls,” a historical fiction novel that tells the story of three women during World War II. One of the women, Caroline Ferriday, a New York socialite on whom the novel is primarily based, once lived in Bethlehem. In fact, she lived across the street from the post office.

“I love discovering bits of Bethlehem’s past,” Hall Kelly wrote in a blog post published in 2014, years before “Lilac Girls” was available to readers everywhere.
On top of its storied postal tradition, Bethlehem embraces its status as a municipality emblematic of the Christmas spirit by celebrating a Christmas Festival every year. The free festival took place Dec. 5 and 6 this year at the Town Green and featured children’s crafts, live music, a scavenger hunt, more than 70 craft and food vendors, photos with Santa Claus, a parade near the lit-up tree, and a 5K race. 3

Butkus said the festival started 44 years after the old Memorial Hall, a place for the town to gather, burned down.

“The proceeds are used to offset the cost of our new Memorial Hall,” Butkus said of the festival. “It is a great honor to lead this community and especially at Christmas time, when it looks so festive. Especially this year when we have some snow on the ground.”