Washington, D.C. ? The District of Columbia postmark is making a big comeback in time for its use on holiday mail, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton announced Tuesday.

The D.C. postmark all but disappeared after the 2001 anthrax attacks in Washington and the deaths of two district post office employees. Most outgoing D.C. mail was shifted to a Gaithersburg, Md., postal center, where it was processed. And it never moved back.

The Gaithersburg facility used the Maryland postmark on most mail, simply because the Maryland and D.C. mail was being mixed together.

Now, mail from the nation’s capital will be routed to machinery that uses a D.C. postmark, Norton said. U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman Deborah Yackley said the change was implemented over the past two weeks.

Norton called the postmark “a proud symbol of our own identity” that is “every bit as important as the postal identifiers from Paris, London, Beijing and other world capitals.”