Cards of Christmas Past
Of all the Christmas traditions I’ve touched on in this advent blog, the sending of cards is one of the oldest of all. The first known example was received by James I of England back in 1611, but it took over two centuries before the idea became commercialised. The first commercially available card was commissioned by civil servant and inventor Sir Henry Cole who had two years previously been involved in establishing the Penny Post service. It’s easy to see why he came up with the idea of sending cards at Christmas. Cole’s first card was designed by genre and historical painter John Callcott Horsley and sold for a shilling. Over 2,000 cards were sold in the first year. Despite the festive image, there’s a decided lack of Christmas iconography – no snow, robins, evergreens or Santa Claus – and early Christmas cards tended to focus on decorative designs with no thematic connection to the festive season.
Today’s cards can be loosely grouped under three headings: sentimental, artistic and humorous. Every year seems to bring new variations, and for a time I was interested to see some cards featuring designs that were more wintry or autumnal than full-on Christmassy. Around ten years ago, I chose a design showing green winter fields, which I thought was a more accurate reflection of a real British Christmas; but I may have been in a minority, as 2024’s crop have been heavy on sentimentality and traditional imagery whilst the humour genre has provided some especially crude examples.
In a typical year, the hallway of our family home was liberally decorated with cards, some hanging on coloured string, others taped to the doors and staircase. When going through the contents of my parents’ house, I came across a suitcase containing some family Christmas cards that had survived for thirty or forty years. Many of them bear the imprint of the Hallmark brand, a family-owned American manufacturer founded in 1910 as Hall Brothers, with the Hallmark name emerging in 1928. Initially specialising in the market for Christmas cards (and inventing modern wrapping paper en route), the company later diversified into general greetings cards and is still going today. Our dad always gave large, colourful, sentimental cards to our mum at Christmas, and this Hallmark branded example probably dates to the early 80s although it looks rather older.
Hallmark were also responsible for the hugely successful range of cards featuring Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters: I first saw these on shelves in the mid 70s, and this example dates from around a decade later. I’m interested to note the reference to ‘snow angels’, a tradition I only became aware of relatively recently (but which has origins that go back at least to 1970):
In the humour category, we find this Gray Joliffe example, also dating to circa the late 1980s, which I sent to our dad, whilst the next card, from around the same era, was an example of a passing fad that appears to have died out – cards that played a piece of music when you opened them. Although the card has survived, the music has not...
If you’d known me in the 1980s or 90s, there’s a chance that you might have received a hand-made Christmas card. There was a time when I did original hand-drawn cards for every occasion, but these days I don’t seem to have the time. From as far back as the mid-70s, I did a hand drawn Christmas card for my brother every year, usually based on some currently popular TV programme or other cultural artefact. One year (1988), I imitated the art of subversive cartoonist Gilbert Shelton to create a card based on his Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers – you couldn’t get anything like that in the shops. Another year it was the turn of the TV series Bottom, which probably places this particular card somewhere in the early 1990s.
Sometimes I drew original cartoons, such as this example showing Santa filling up his Reindeer at a petrol station. The reference to unleaded fuel, introduced in Britain in 1986, probably places it around the end of that decade, when it had become a popular media talking point. I'll leave you with another original which I created way back in 1989. The gag was my own, although I'm sure someone else has probably come up with it since...
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