Christmas Cards

We have all become so accustomed to sending and receiving beautifully decorated and eloquently phrased store-bought Christmas cards that we take it for granted that past generations have done the same as will future generations. However, the fact is that sending commercially printed Christmas cards is a relatively recent phenomenon taking us back to 1843 London, England.

Prior to then, people were exchanging Christmas greetings on handwritten notes that were either delivered in person or they were sent via postal services. Eventually, the postal services became the favorite means by which to dispatch Christmas greetings and its popularity grew to burdensome proportions. In 1822, the Superintendent of Mails in Washington D.C. requested that sixteen more postmen be hired during the holiday season and, fearing that the overload will create an unmanageable bottleneck, he further petitioned Congress to limit the exchange of cards by post. To his chagrin, not only did Congress ignore his petition, but the postal burden worsened far beyond his worst fears.

The first Christmas card that was intended for commercial sale was created by John Calcott Horsley in the summer of 1843. Horsley was a well known and respected artist and illustrator in London who was commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, a wealthy British businessman, to design a Christmas card that he could proudly send to his family, friends and business associates. Being the prominent innovator who modernized the British postal system, managed the construction of the Albert Hall, organized the Great Exhibition of 1851 and oversaw the opening ceremony of the Victoria and Albert Museum; Sir Henry Cole also ran an art shop on Bond Street that specialized in decorative objects for the home and that is where he sold the first commercial Christmas cards.

The first commercially Christmas card portrayed two good deeds — feeding the hungry and clothing the naked — on each side panel. Its centerpiece depicted a large celebration of adults and children with an abundance of food and drink. This depiction, by the way, received must criticism from the ardent British Temperance Movement. The inscription of this first Christmas card read: “Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you.” At the time, “merry” meant “blessed” as in “merry old England.”

One thousand cards were printed of that first Christmas card designed by John Calcott Horsley for Sir Henry Cole and twelve of these still exist today in private collections. And, surprisingly or not, this card proved to be a trendsetter of a lasting kind because printed cards very soon became hot commodities throughout England and soon after that in Germany.

It took another thirty years for commercially designed and printed Christmas cards to gain popularity in America and it began in 1875 when Louis Prang, a German born lithographer in Boston, started designing and publishing Christmas cards. Thus, Louis Prang is considered to be the “father of the American Christmas card.” However, Prang’s Christmas cards were high quality and therefore very costly and they depicted non-Christmas-like scenes such as floral arrangements of roses, daisies, gardenias, geraniums and apple blossoms which failed to generate enough sales and he was forced out of business in 1890. The American public finally bought into the idea of commercially produced Christmas cards but they preferred the cheap penny Christmas postcards which were imported from Germany and these remained in high demand until the end of World War I, when America established its own greeting card industry.

Today’s Christmas card industry is booming with annual revenues of billions of dollars and the cards come in myriads of styles, sizes and costs — there are Christmas cards to suite anyone’s taste. The traditional greeting that said “wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” has evolved into countless variations on this greeting and many contemporary Christmas cards express more sentiment, more religious intonations that may include biblical verses, more humor or more poetry. To make selection of Christmas cards easier and more recipient-appropriate, one can find Christmas cards especially designed for moms, dads, sisters, brothers, bosses, lovers, friends, and so on and on and on.