The History of Christmas Cards

The tradition of giving Christmas cards to acquaintances, friends, and family along is one that is deeply entrenched in many people around the world. In fact, there are a lot of people who give also Christmas cards to their co-workers, supervisors and even clients as a gesture of goodwill during the holiday season. But where did the idea of giving cards at Christmastime come from? In the U.S., handmade Christmas cards were exchanged in person early on in the country’s history, and then later by way of the U.S. Postal Service. By 1822, many handmade greetings were being sent through the mail; in fact, there were so many that the Superintendent of Mails tried, unsuccessfully, to petition Congress to limit the number of cards that could be sent through the mail. John Calcott Horsley, a British illustrator, printed the first commercial Christmas card for Sir Henry Cole in 1843. Sir Henry Cole wanted something he could send to friends and family, and professional colleagues and other acquaintances, to wish them the blessings of the season, a way of saying Merry Christmas with a little more than spoken words. A thousand of these three-panel cards, which had images of a family enjoying the Christmas holiday around a dinner table filled with food in the center, and various people performing charitable works, such as giving clothing to homeless people, on the front and back, were printed and sold, making it the first publicly sold Christmas card in history. These cards quickly became very popular in both England and Germany; however, it wasn’t until the 1870s that commercially printed cards made their way to the U.S. A printer named Louis Prang started mass-producing Christmas cards around that time so that the average person could afford to buy them and send them out. In 1915, a man named Joyce C. Hall, along with his brothers, created Hallmark for the purpose of marketing and selling greeting cards, which was such a success that a mere three years later they were also marketing their own line of gift wrap. In 1932 they patented what they called Eye-Vision, which was putting greeting cards out on display racks so people could see them before buying them. They were the pioneers in displaying greeting cards this way. Christmas card designs tended to change depending on the times, such as spoofs on the impoverished condition of many people during the Great Depression, and Santa Claus carrying an American Flag during WWII. In 1954, Americans sent 2 billion Christmas cards as a personal and heartfelt way of saying Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. Today, that number stands at over 4 billion, with the average person sending out about twenty cards, however, many people send out a lot more than twenty, including 62,824 sent in one year by Werner Erhard of San Francisco. Critics blame people like him for what they see as a waste of money and paper, however, the tradition is not slowing, and therefore unlikely to end anytime soon.