Christmas Cards Facts

Did you ever wonder who sent the first Christmas Card? The first commercial Christmas card is believed to have been designed and printed in London in 1843, the same year Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol”. beforehand, people had exchanged handwritten Christmas greetings, first in person and later via post.

By 1822, homemade Christmas cards had become the bane of the U.S. postal system. That year, the Superintendent of Mails in Washington, D.C., complained of the require to take into service sixteen additional mailmen. Fearful of future bottlenecks, he petitioned Congress to limit the exchange of cards by post, concluding, “I don’t know what we’ll do if it holds on.”

In 1843, Sir Henry Cole, a rich British businessman, wanted a card he could proudly send to friends and professional acquaintances to need them a “merry Christmas.” He inquired his friend John Callcott Horsley to design it and Horsley generated a triptych. Each of the two side panels depicted a good deed-clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. The centerpiece featured a party of adults and children, with plentiful food and drink. Puritans automatically denounced the card, since it showed people drinking in the family party. But with most people the idea was a brilliant success and the Christmas card rapidly became very extended.

The card’s inscription read: “merry Christmas and a glad New Year to you.” “Merry” was then a spiritual word meaning “blessed,” as in “merry old England.” A batch of 1,000 of the cards were printed on a lithograph stone then hand-colored by an expert colorer named Mason. Of the original one thousand cards, only twelve exist today in private collections. In December 2005, one of these Christmas cards was sold for £8,469 at a Wiltshire auction.

Early English cards rarely showed winter or religious themes, as a replacement favoring flowers, fairies and other fanciful designs that reminded the recipient of the approach of spring. Humorous and sentimental pictures of children and animals were extended, as were increasingly elaborate shapes, decorations and materials.

Printed Christmas cards in short became the rage in England; then in Germany. But it indispensable an extra thirty years for Americans to take to the idea. In 1875, Boston lithographer Louis Prang, a native of Germany, began publishing cards, and earned the caption “father of the American Christmas card.”

Prang’s high-quality cards were expensive, and they initially featured not such pictures as the Madonna and Child, a decorated tree, or even Santa Claus, but colored floral alliances of roses, daisies, gardenias, geraniums, and apple blossoms. Americans took to Christmas cards, but not to Prang’s; he was forced out of business in 1890. It was low-priced penny Christmas postcards imported from Germany that remained the vogue until World War 1. By war’s end, America’s modern greeting card industry had been born.

Today more than two billion Christmas cards are exchanged yearly, just within the U.S.. Christmas is the number one card-selling holiday of the year. though, the estimated number of Christmas cards received by American households came down from 29 in 1987 to 20 in 2004. Today, email and telephones permit for more usual contact and are easier for generations raised without handwritten letters – specifically given the availability of websites selling free email Christmas cards.

Facts About Christmas Cards

Christmas cards weren’t the first greetings cards. Since 1796, with improvements in printing, wholesalers had been sending cards to their customers selling “best wishes” for the new year.

In the nineteenth century, the British Post Office used to deliver cards on Christmas morning.

The first Christmas stamp was released in Canada in 1898.

The average person in Britain sends 50 Christmas cards per annum.

Only one in 100 Christmas cards sold in Britain contains any religious imagery or message, a every day Mail survey has revealed.

What do your Christmas cards reveal about your personality?

Modern cards: Extroverted and enthusiastic about life, even though somewhat hopeful and simply upset, with a tendency to be more creative and unconventional than most.

Humorous cards: Outgoing and emotionally safe, but with a distinct lack of warmth and sympathy for others.

Traditional cards: People who like better reading a good book to a night out on the town, with a tendency to experience extremes of emotions, and go after the rules.

Abstract cards: Tendency to be disorganized and spontaneous, very strung, and a low require to surround themselves with others

Cute cards: Sympathetic, calm and open to new experiences, and with a tendency to like better one’s own firm to others.

Religious cards: Emotionally steady, sympathetic to the reqs. of others, and well-organized.