The Rise and Flourishment of the Christmas Card

The History of the Christmas Card, George Buday

Oh, I was a bad girl. Someone talked about this book so temptingly on a Christmas group I am on that I hunted down a copy even though I didn't intend to buy any more Christmas books this year. Luckily it was at a reasonable price! This book is a year older than myself, and is a charmingly vintage and scholarly look at the history of the first Christmas card and the "growing," as they say these days, of the custom of sending them. Today we so nonchalantly declare that the first Christmas card was sent by John Calcott Horsley in 1843 that we forget there was a time, as at the printing of this book, that this information had just been recently discovered by scholars. Previously people kept in touch with long Christmas letters, the forerunner of the "Christmas newsletter" some people tuck into their Christmas cards or packages, but busy Horsley was dismayed by the time it took to sit down and write all these missives. He had his friend Sir Henry Cole design the card for him, and then sent it to his friends in lieu of a letter. Others thought it a delightful idea and soon other printers and lithographers were designing these "Christmas cards" and they became fashionable.

How the cards looked also had an interesting history. The first Christmas cards were the size of visiting cards (a slightly larger version of the business card people still used today) that one dropped off in a friend's front hall if you stopped by and that friend was not at home, like postcards. It was only later that they opened and had a sentiment inside. The card was invented, in fact, before the creation of the envelope, so that many times they were technically postcards, with an address scribbled on the reverse side. Eventually these cards became so elaborate, made of not just paper but silks and satins, false "jewels," metallic colored cardboard, metal, feathers, etc. and decorated with elaborate cut-outs and sometimes made to unfold, that they actually substituted as gifts, and people kept them in scrapbooks. Most of Buday's examples, for instance, came from the copious Christmas card scrapbooks kept by Queen Mary, the wife of King George V of Great Britain. So this book has a mainly-British focus, although the Louis Prang company, the original creator of Christmas cards in the United States, and Rust Craft cards, also in the U.S., are mentioned briefly (as is "Hall Brothers," the company that later became the 8000-pound gorilla of cardmakers, Hallmark).

As I said, this is a scholarly book, and Buday goes into minute details of the cards, which include elaborate animated and "mechanical" cards, some of what we would today call "pop-up" cards. The craftsmanship on the latter cards sounds incredible in the detailing included in these works of art, produced on 19th century printing presses and then hand-crafted. Buday also discusses subjects portrayed on cards (he doesn't even try to explain, though, the bizarre Victorian convention of having dead birds, usually robins, on their cards!) and the surprising revelation that, even though Christian groups will try to persuade you that "people were more religious back then," the Nativity is portrayed fewer times on Christmas cards even back in the 19th century, less than sleighs, stagecoaches, holly and ivy, Christmas trees, children, etc.! Included in the cards shown are hand-drawn or hand-embellished cards by "Bertie" (later King George VI) and his daughter as a child, now Queen Elizabeth II. He also traces the style of the Christmas card in correlation with the Valentine cards of the day.

A really "nifty" (excuse the "Addieism") look at Christmas card development over the years if you can deal with the scholarly prose.