Christmas Cards

The Lord of Misrule's Christmas Guide
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Christmas Cards

It can be very difficult to precisely date anything to do with Christmas and yet with Christmas cards we know the very people who created the first commercial Christmas card and the exact year in which they sent it.

People had always exchanged festive wishes, either orally or as written or hand-drawn notes delivered in person or by post. In the early 1800s, stationers sold sheets of festive writing paper on which people could compose their own messages, though this was very timing consuming if you had to send the greetings of the season to an extended family or to lots of friends.

And then, in 1843, (the same year as Dickens wrote his iconic festive novel ‘A Christmas Carol’) Sir Henry Cole - a British civil servant working at the Public Records Office in London and a noted aestheticist - used a simple piece of lateral thinking to save him having to pen lots of hand-written messages.

At the time, is was common for people to exchange decorative Valentines’ Day cards and, borrowing from this tradition, Cole hit upon the idea of creating a pre-printed Christmas card with a pre-endorsed message to use to send his festive wishes to friends and family: all he needed to do was to add the names of the recipients and his own signature: the rest would be done for him in the printing process.

So Cole commissioned a Victorian artist, called John Calcott Horsley, to design a card for him: a Christmas card with a clear symbolic message. The first card (click here to see the card) depicted a family toasting Christmas flanked on one side by poor people being fed, and on the other side by poor people being clothed: the moral being that at a time of celebration and rejoicing, the affluent should remember their follow men and help to provide them with common wants and needs. The card bore the inscription: “A Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year To You” – words which have become commonplace on cards today.

Cole commissioned a run of 1,000 lithographs (prints copied from a metal plate covered with ink) and used them for his own private and business contacts, but selling the residue stock through an artists’ shop that he owned in Bond Street for 1 shilling each: about five new pence (or seven euro cents; or nine US cents). Of the original 1,000 cards, only 12 are known to have survived to this day.

The depiction in the cards was considered by some people as being outrageous (the Temperance Movement considered the family’s festiveness as indulgent, and the wider Church disliked the idea of Christmas being toasted with alcohol), and Cole eventually withdrew the remaining cards from sale. But Cole’s idea – married to the cheap ‘penny post to anywhere in the UK’ – had sparked a flame of interest and in the years that followed the custom of sending pre-printed Christmas cards grew exponentially.

Today, billions of cards are exchanged around the world each year, making Cole’s little time-saving idea the most important product in card-makers’ catalogues.