Now millions of them will be - after the US postal system is done printing this year's holiday stamps.
Every year in October - November, I look forward to the issue of Christmas stamps. I am partial to the secular edition. I love the colorful images of everyday, cheerful objects. This year the Christmas stamps promise to be particularly pretty - depicting a natural object which is as gorgeous in real life as any artist's rendition of it. The 2006 Christmas commemorative stamps will feature snowflakes.
"Through rain and sleet and dead of night and all that, your letters next winter can be delivered bearing snowflakes artfully photographed by a physicist who weathers those same storms to study nature's crystal magic.
Starting in October, the U.S. Postal Service will issue a set of four stamps featuring pictures of snowflakes taken by Kenneth Libbrecht, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology.
For years, Libbrecht has been studying the physics of snowflakes, looking at the different patterns of crystal growth and snowflake formation.
"I'm trying to understand the dynamics of how crystals grow, all the way down to the molecular level," Libbrecht said. "This is a very complicated problem, and I've been looking at ice as a particularly interesting case study."
Snowflakes are nothing more than ice, but the forms a single flake can take are dizzyingly complex. A single crystal of ice is known as a snow crystal. And one or more snow crystals stuck together make a snowflake.
There is, as you've heard, endless possibilities for how they stick together.
More about Libbrecht's work with snowflakes here.
photo of an actual snow flake 
from Kenneth Libbrecht's laboratory
USPS issue of 2006 commemorative stamps
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