Christmas card
The content of the design might relate directly to the Christmas narrative with depictions of the Nativity of Jesus, or have Christian symbols such as the Star of Bethlehem or a white dove representing both the Holy Spirit and Peace.
The first known Christmas card was sent by Michael Maier to James I of England and his son Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1611.
[2] It was hand-made and incorporated Rosicrucian imagery, with the words of the greeting – "A greeting on the birthday of the Sacred King, to the most worshipful and energetic lord and most eminent James, King of Great Britain and Ireland, and Defender of the true faith, with a gesture of joyful celebration of the Birthday of the Lord, in most joyand fortune, we enter into the new auspicious year 1612" – being laid out to form a rose.
The first commercially available card was commissioned by Sir Henry Cole and designed by John Callcott Horsley in London 1843.
[3][4][5] The central picture showed three generations of a family raising a toast to the card's recipient: on either side were scenes of charity, with food and clothing being given to the poor.
[6] Allegedly the image of the family drinking wine together proved controversial, but the idea was shrewd: Cole had helped introduce the Penny Post three years earlier.
[7] Early British cards rarely showed winter or religious themes, instead favoring flowers, fairies and other fanciful designs that reminded the recipient of the approach of spring.
At Christmas 1873, the lithograph firm Prang and Mayer began creating greeting cards for the popular market in Britain.
Nostalgic, sentimental, and religious images have continued in popularity, and, in the 21st century, reproductions of Victorian and Edwardian cards are easy to obtain.
The British royal family's cards are generally portraits reflecting significant personal events of the year.
There is a long-standing custom for the American President and First Lady to send White House Christmas Cards each holiday season.
In September 1964, it was reported that, during the previous eight years, British industry had increasingly stopped sending "official" Christmas cards, including Granada, ICI, Schweppes, Shell and Unilver.
Small decorative stickers are also made to seal the back of envelopes, typically showing a trinket or some symbol of Christmas.
A revival of interest in paper crafts, particularly scrapbooking, has raised the status of the homemade card and made available an array of tools for stamping, punching, and cutting.
Crowdsourcing, another trend enabled by the Internet, has allowed thousands of independent and hobbyist graphic designers to produce and distribute holiday cards around the world.
Some people take the annual mass-mailing of cards as an opportunity to update those they know with the year's events, and include the so-called "Christmas letter" reporting on the family's doings, sometimes running to multiple printed pages.
[26] While a practical notion, Christmas letters meet with a mixed reception; recipients may take it as boring minutiae, bragging, or a combination of the two, whereas other people appreciate Christmas letters as more personal than mass-produced cards with a generic missive and an opportunity to "catch up" with the lives of family and friends who are rarely seen or communicated with.
During the first 70 years of the 19th century it was common for Christmas and other greeting cards to be recycled by women's service organizations who collected them and removed the pictures, to be pasted into scrap books for the entertainment of children in hospitals, orphanages, kindergartens and missions.
