If you are like me and find yourself changing the default font for every Stickies note that you make, you can change the defaults used for new notes. Control-click on the Stickies application in the Finder and choose Show Package Contents. Go to Contents -> Resources and edit the defaultSettings.plist file, using the Property List Editor (part of the Xcode Developer Tools package).
[robg adds: The settings you can modify include font (FontName and FontSize), note size (ViewHeight and ViewWidth), and color (ColourIndex, with 0 = yellow, 1 = blue, etc. as shown in Stickies' Color menu). The final variable is WindowFlags, which controls the window's appearance: 0 is a standard sticky note, 1 is a minimized (title bar only) note, and 2 is a floating note. (I couldn't find a way to make a window translucent by default.) On my machine at least, this plist file isn't binary, so you could also edit it with TextEdit or any other pure text editor. As always when modifying an application, make a backup first, just in case something bad happens.]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060830041523307