The History of Christmas Cards

Herewith we present the history of the first Christmas card. The year is 1843 and Sir Henry Cole, the founder of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, has a problem. He wants to send a Christmas greeting to his friends and remind them to help those less fortunate than themselves during the holiday season. But, as one of the era’s most well-known people, he has simply too many friends and associates to write them all personally and he wants his message to be distributed as widely as possible. So he decides to have a card professionally printed. With this simple act he thereby establishes a milestone in greeting card history in general and Christmas card history in particular.

Were there no cards sent pre-Cole? Of course there were—Christmas card history is filled with examples of individual handwritten cards sent to friends and family to mark the holiday season, but Cole’s card was the first to be professionally printed and mass-produced. So in a very real sense his place in greeting card history is as the founder of the holiday card business. His card is in many ways a masterful and somewhat subtle melding of messages—modern marketers take note! The card contains a central drawing by John Calcott Horsley of a happy family enjoying a bountiful holiday feast accompanied by drawings on each side, presented triptych-style, of the poor and unfortunate receiving needed help from kind-hearted benefactors. Beneath the smiling family is the now timeless message, “A Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year To You.”

The card was not without controversy though. Calcott’s central drawing appears to show a youngster taking a sip of wine, an action that mightily offended the sensibilities of England’s censorious Victorians.

Printed cards became much more common after that, though Americans, who wished to pursue the practice, were forced to import their cards from England until a German immigrant named Louis Prang began commercially printing Christmas cards in his lithographic shop in Boston in 1875. A scant six years later, Prang was producing a whopping five million cards a year.