Who invented the Christmas card?
Understanding the custom of both giving and sending Christmas cards as well as the preferred imprinted illustrations on them is highly difficult without having a look at the historical development of Christmas celebrations.
In the year 354 A.D. Pope Gregory declared the 25th of December to be Jesus's birthday and thus an official holiday. He thereby combined this Christian festival with the heathen solstice celebrations, the Roman Saturnalia and the Scandinavian Yule festivals which used to be connected with enormous joy, invitations, grand dinners and presents. The symbolism attributed to the crib and singing special songs were not added until the Middle Ages.
The festive celebration with the Christmas tree - as we see it today developed in the 19th century. In 1868, Harper's Magazine first published a drawing by Thomas Nast depicting the figure of Father Christmas (Santa Claus) in the U.S.A., [origin: Sinterklaas] who was brought to America by Dutch immigrants. Sinterklaas, on the other hand, is based on a legend of the Holy Nicholas of Myra (304 345), a Christian clergyman, who became, among other functions, the patron saint of Russia and of children. There is, however, very little definitive information on him. In many countries, children put their boots in front of the door on his Name-Day, the 6th of December, and expect the man wearing a white beard and a red coat to fill them with sweets or presents. The sleigh pulled by reindeers is also an American invention. The various different types of Father Christmas are still among the most popular motifs on Christmas cards all over the world.
It was in December 1843 when a young British civil servant by the name of Henry Cole only had very little spare time or just did not feel like writing long letters to all his friends and relatives on the occasion of the forthcoming Christmas. He therefore asked the illustrator and painter John Callcott Horsley to design a Christmas card for him bearing the words: Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.
Inspired by the form of an altar pictured panel, Horsley designed the picture of a family celebration sized 5 7 x 3 3 inches framed by branches and tendrils. The motif conveyed the feelings of cheerfulness and charity to the people regarding it.
Henry Cole, who had his own lithographic institute, printed a manually coloured edition of 1,000 cards bearing this motif and sold them at the then exorbitant price of 1 shilling each*. Cole's order which had been placed with Horsley, is assumed to be the Christmas card's birth and the trigger for a custom which is still even more than 150 years later increasingly popular all over the world.
Henry Cole later became the first director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This influential position provided him with the opportunity of promoting his favourite project, the Pennypost, and thus enabled the new custom of sending Christmas cards to experience its real breakthrough. The Royal Mail in Great Britain has awarded a prize for the best design of a Christmas card every year since 19..... This prize-cup is called the "Henry" in honourable memory of Henry Cole.
The Pennypost was introduced in Britain in 1840, the same year as the first stamp. Numerous strata of the population were so enthusiastic that they made immediate use of it, especially during the Christmas season. Indeed, the invention of a Christmas card was then a logical consequence. As early as 1850, many editions were able to be printed due to the great demand, so that the price fell to an acceptable level. The Christmas card became a lucrative business for numerous publishers and the corresponding trades. Many people, from woodcutters, paper manufacturers, artists, printers, forwarders, etc. up to postmen gained employment and earned money from it.
The motifs have changed according to the spirit of times; however, decorated Christmas trees, holly/mistletoe branches, snowball fights, winter sceneries, sledge/sleigh rides and robins have always remained fashionable. Demanding art, religious or Japanese style as well as humourous motifs and illustrations of Father Christmas have also been sent on Christmas cards.
In the United States, the owner of a grocery shop in Albany, NY, produced a card with Christmas greetings in the middle of the 19th century bearing the following words: Pease's Great Variety Store in the Temple of Fancy _. However, sending Christmas greetings was not yet popular there at that time. Louis Prang in Boston, who had immigrated from Germany, did not realise until 1874 that there was the chance of introducing Christmas cards in America. Up until then, the habit had existed exclusively in Great Britain. Louis Prang is nowadays regarded as the father of the American greeting card. The American Greeting Card Association has annually donated a prize for the best greeting card design of the year in his memory since 1988: the Louie Award.
Prang improved colour printing and used up to twenty different colours for the production of his Christmas cards. He introduced other formats to those known before and organised competitions offering considerable prizes for artistic Christmas card designs. The high quality of his products and the emotional and sensitive texts inside the cards made him a successful entrepreneur. In 1880, he produced more than 5 million greeting cards per year. In the late eighties of the 19th century, however, the U.S.A. was inundated with cheap imports from Germany. In 1890, Prang gave up, but other American publishers re-conquered the Northern American market with its constantly increasing demand, immediately after the turn of the century.
Although large quantities of Christmas postcards were obviously produced in Germany for export purposes, it was not yet customary in the country itself to send such cards. In the second half of the 19th century up until the First World War, people used to send so-called Best Wishes Sheets for Christmas. They were sheets of writing-paper with printed ornamental decorations in the margin and often with a picture. People themselves used to write greetings or poems on them. When the picture postcard's heyday started between 1890 and 1895, the first mass-produced Christmas cards were made both as open postcards and cards sent in envelopes. Up until the time prior to the Second World War, the custom was to send good wishes for Christmas and the New Year separately. The open postcard as a medium of sending good wishes for Christmas lost more and more importance in the second half of the 20th century due to increasing wealth and the desire for more individualism, and cards sent in envelopes consequently gained in importance.
Günter Garbrecht, Bremen, July 1998
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*Burney Jan <Graphis Ephemera 1> Pedersen Design N.Y. 1995
_ Encyclopedia Britannica 98
_ Fink, Joanne <Greeting Card Design> PBC INTERNATIONAL,
Inc., Glen Cove, NY, 1992
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