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 Subject: Christmas Cards
 
Author: Serra International
Date:   12/19/2016 1:36 am 
http://www.printeryhouse.org/

These days, the greeting card industry is a multimillion-dollar business, with a large portion of its profits coming from a single holiday: Christmas.

We take Christmas cards for granted now, but few of us know the story of how they became of the most commonplace traditions of the season.

In 1843, writer, publisher, museum director and general Renaissance man Sir Henry Cole found his mailbox stuffed with letters from family and friends at Christmastime. Busy as he was, he knew that he could not answer them all in kind, and worried that his correspondents would feel slighted.

But then he remembered an art project he undertook as a schoolboy: Each student was to illustrate what Christmas meant to them on a stiff piece of paper. These artworks would be sent as gifts to their families. This, he thought, could be a novel and attractive way of sending seasonal wishes to his friends -- and one that would save him the time it took to write a proper letter.

Cole took this idea of a brief pictorial Christmas greeting to a respected illustrator of the time, John Callcott Horsley. Cole instructed him to create a trifold card with the center panel being a typical Christmas scene, but specified that the side panels had to be images inspiring the recipient to acts of goodwill and generosity toward the poor and neglected.

The debut of the card was not without controversy; while the central image depicted a typical Dickensian Fezziwig-style Christmas gathering, Puritans said it encouraged drinking (taking special offense at the mother letting her child have a taste of wine in the foreground). The Puritans did have a point: until the German influence of Prince Albert who wed Queen Victoria in 1840, Christmas was not anything like the family-centered, religious holiday it is today; instead it was a night of drunkenness, carousing and crime.

Still, Cole's first run of 1,000 cards caught on like wildfire, and in two years Christmas cards were adopted by most of England. The tradition spread quickly to Europe, but it took about 30 years before the custom took hold in the United States. Soon, Christians all over the world took to sending these cheerful, inexpensive greetings through the mail at Christmas.

For many years, Christmas cards depicted wintry scenes or families like Horsley's original rendering. In the late 19th century the image of Santa Claus became popular. It wasn't until the 20th century that Christmas cards were used to convey the real meaning of the season: the nativity of Jesus.
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 Topics Author  Date      
 Christmas Cards    
Serra International 12/19/2016 1:36 am 
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