Motif: symbolic depiction of a snow covered tree (art technique: tempera-painting) With New Year everything goes back to the beginning. Everything becomes possible again, as if the white snow deleted all the errors of the world offering a new page to joyful colours. That is, of course, how the children see it. That is why the New Year belongs to them and that is why the Croatian Post leaves to them that small white surface of the stamp– which itself however reaches very far – to fill it up with their lines and colours, their wishes and messages. The grown-ups always give kids tasks, make proposals and evaluate. This is not entirely bad, since the frame is necessary for freedom to develop. So, this small white stamp surface is a big New Year’s homework. The theme is provided for this homework that all Croatian kids know and understand very well, the theme that will be transmitted to all other kids and grown-up kids in the whole world. This homework refers, naturally, to a winter image. The repertoire of winter images is not the same everywhere: somewhere snow is a normal occurrence, somewhere it scarcely ever occurs. However, our experience does not rely only on the real world; the screens, window-shops, posters, all kind of picture messages make our concepts almost typified in the same way as they make also our experience of year seasons typified. The differences are still best sensed by children - and they will find their best expression in the New Years’ stamp of Croatian Post. This year’s theme is "The Magic Tree". Each tree is already a magic in itself. The one evergreen, persistent and dark; the other deciduous, with soft buds in spring, thick greenness giving protective shade in summer, like an exposition of all kinds of sunny colours in autumn, like a lattice of lines permissive for the last light and warmness in winter– tree is a traffic light of year’s seasons. It speaks about change and recurrence, competes from the earliest age with our growth, it shows us often from distance where our home is and itself makes a home to many lively, especially winged and chirping beings. To this years’ competition many wonderful trees arrived – each one different – and it was not an easy task to choose which of them shall travel the world on our stamp. The reason why exactly the tree by the pupil Marta Bilandžija from Elementary School „Ivan Goran Kovačić“ , (teacher Snježana Bošnjak ) from Slavonski Brod has been chosen is maybe because it is very thick tree, in unusual and sensibly nuanced colours, full of some inner glow in the middle of the gently connected earth and sky. In nuances of its green colour – from almost yellow to dark tones - it has retained sun throughout the whole year, though being covered, as the image itself, by falling white snow. Today, when in changed climate conditions and perturbed year’s seasons more and more often buds catch up with dry leaves, this smart tree records also this new tempo of the year’s spin and reminds us of a different dimension of time experience. The paintress Sabina Rešić, designeress of the stamp, has tried to interweave letters and numbers into the tree so as to become its natural surroundings. We shall wish this tree to keep growing for a long time and live to see many more new years. Željka Čorak
