A fifty year tradition of the Altrusa Club continued this year when its members got together to lend support to another charity.

Since the club's inception in 1948, Altrusa Club members have devoted, as part of their community service at Christmas, several hours to folding the Christmas Seals for the Bermuda TB Cancer and Health Association.

It is a practice that was introduced to the membership by Mona Carle and over the years the number of seals to be folded has increased steadily to the point where today some 30,000 plus seals are folded. At 50 seals to an envelope it is no small task!

"We are up to 15,000 envelopes and that includes two sheets of seals per envelope," said Mary Faries, the president of Altrusa Club which has 26 active members.

"It's a service and that's what we are, a service club and we're here to help out. It's something we've done year after year. They look forward to us doing it. As soon as we receive them we fold them, usually late October to the beginning of November."

The Altrusa Club's longest serving and oldest members are Peggy Spencer-Arscott, who celebrated her 80th birthday last week, and Ivy Spurling. They have each been folding seals since the early 1950s and cannot recall that any seal design has ever been duplicated.

According to the senior members it was Mrs. Carle, a charter member when the club was established in Bermuda, who introduced the folding of the seals in roughly 1950.

Mrs. Carle was president of the Bermuda Club from 1965-67 and was governor of District One Altrusa International from 1972-74. She passed away in 1991, but current members of the club are certain she would be pleased that the club still continues this service every Christmas.

In the early days the seals resembled postage stamps and had glue on the back. With the local climate it was necessary to insert an extra sheet of lightweight parchment paper between them to prevent sticking.

Nowadays, however, they are peeled away from a backing which is a definite plus. In the 1950s and into the `60s the club members folded about a quarter of the amount they do today.

The seals were received in October, as they still are, and the members got together at one of their homes, around a large table and amid chatter and companionship, were able to fold them in an evening in those days.

"Now we receive them in October, start them off at our October general meeting at the Red Cross headquarters and then take the remaining with us to fold," said Marguerite Lovell, director of communications.

"Most members will work in groups of two or three and we complete and return them folded in the envelopes to the TB and Cancer Association for the beginning of November to go on sale.

"This service is particularly nice for the older members who are not able to be as active as they would like. It still enables them to give to the community. This year our immediate past president, Mrs. Marilyn Dingwell, who had an accident earlier in the year and is still recuperating, was able to still give some community service through folding some of the seals at home."

A brightly coloured seal on an envelope at Christmas time does more than fundraise to help find cures for lung disease - Christmas Seals also raise lung awareness among the public.

Each year in Canada more than $10 million is raised through the Christmas Seal campaign. But who came up with the idea of a coloured stamp to raise money and awareness for lung disease?

The idea for a Christmas Seal was first conceived in Denmark in 1903 by a postal worker named Einar Holboell. Initially the money raised was to be used in assisting underprivileged children. When the stamps went on sale in 1904, the campaign was so successful that more than four million seals were sold. It was then decided to use the money to help the thousands of children who were crippled from tuberculosis.

This was a turning point in the history of TB because it allowed ordinary citizens to take part in fighting this infectious disease which at the time was a leading cause of death.

In 1907, Christmas Seals were introduced to the United States by Emily Bissell. She was trying to raise funds in order to keep a sanatorium for TB patients open because, without money, infectious patients would have to live among the public where the disease would be spread.

Recalling a magazine article sent to her by a Danish-American friend about using Christmas Seals to fight TB, Ms Bissell adopted the idea and printed seals in hopes of raising money to prevent the sanitorium from closing. Unfortunately, postal authorities were not enthusiastic about linking Christmas to a deadly disease and would not allow the seals to be sold.

Still determined, Ms. Bissell continued on her one-woman campaign and, by enlisting the support of a prominent daily newspaper in Philadelphia, was finally able to sell the Christmas Seals.

World of the campaign from Denmark and the US reached Canada and inspired citizens in Toronto and Hamilton began Christmas Seals campaigns to help build hospitals for TB patients. Publicity was given by the old Toronto Globe, which ran stories about how community groups, schools and volunteers sold seals to help build sanatoria in other parts of Canada.

In 1927, it was agreed that the Christmas Seal campaign was to be the official method for tuberculosis associations to appeal to the public for funds. It was also a means of creating awareness that tuberculosis could be controlled. At first, the money raised was used to build new sanatoria, then for TB prevention, enabling millions of Canadians to have chest x-rays or tuberculin tests. In this way, thousands of cases were caught before the disease spread to others.

Although tuberculosis is not a threat to life and health that it was 50 years ago, about 3,000 cases a year are still diagnosed in Canada. Meanwhile, other diseases of the lungs, emphysema, lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, asthma and occupational lung disease, though not infectious, have increased enormously.

Christmas Seal funds are now used to research ways of preventing, curing and treating these diseases. Funds are also used for the operation of public and professional education initiatives such as school programmes that inform children about the dangers of tobacco use, smoking cessation programmes and lung health and environmental awareness campaigns.

It is hoped that Christmas Seals will be as powerful an instrument against all lung diseases as they have been against tuberculosis.