How a UK official with too many letters to write came up with the first Christmas card

Pressed for time, Cole got a friend, artist John Callcott Horsley, to paint a Christmassy picture, and had a printer print 1,000 copies, which could be personalised with a “To,…” section. The first Christmas card was born.

Incidentally, 1843 was also the year Charles Dickens wrote ‘A Christmas Carole’, now a big part of Christmas celebrations.

How the UK card industry evolved

Cole’s card was a triptych, with two panels depicting acts of charity (‘feeding the hungry’ and ‘clothing the naked’), and the central one depicting three generations of family celebrating – pious, proper, and picture-perfect festivity! Once he had used up the cards he needed, Cole put the rest for sale at a shilling each (costly for the time), under the pseudonym Felix Summerly.

According to UK’s Postal Museum website, “An advert in the Athenaeum paper for the cards read: “Just published. A Christmas Congratulation Card: or picture emblematical of Old English Festivity to Perpetuate kind recollections between Dear Friends.””

The card Horsley sent to Cole had a tiny self-portrait in the bottom right corner instead of his signature, along with the text “Xmasse, 1843”. (Photo courtesy: http://www.vam.ac.uk)

The cards did cause minor consternation for showing children drinking wine at a time when the temperance movement was gaining ground in England, but they still proved popular, the Postal Museum website says.

The second Christmas card in the UK was designed by artist William Maw Egley in 1848, according to the V&A. The museum’s website says, “The design is noticeably similar to the first card: both show scenes of middle-class festive merriment offset with acts of seasonal charity, and both were printed on single sheets about the size of a ladies’ visiting card.”

For the first two or three decades, the cards remained more of a bourgeois trend, sold in bookshops and stationers, and “were expensive, at “ninepence the two designs”,” according to the V&A website.

“Publishers such as Hildesheimer & Co. imported cheaper cards from Germany, before producing the ‘penny basket’ around 1879, which contained around a dozen cards and was sold through tobacconists, drapers and toy shops. The Half Penny Post, introduced in 1894, further boosted Christmas card sales, with the less expensive (both to buy and send) postcard format becoming most popular,” the website says.

In the US

The Christmas cards trend soon crossed the Atlantic to the US, and then unsurprisingly assumed gigantic proportions. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, “Louis Prang, a Prussian immigrant with a print shop near Boston, is credited with creating the first Christmas card originating in the United States in 1875.”

The three angles is one of the most popular Hallmark Christmas card designs, first published in 1977 and created by Ruth Morehead. (Photo: ebay)

Soon, publishers were organising competitions for the best card designs, with cash prizes on offer. By 1915, a Kansas City-based postcard printing company run by the three Hall brothers – which later became a certain Hallmark – published a holiday card, and experts say this can be seen as the birth of the greeting card industry as we know it today.

According to the Smithsonian, The Hall Brothers “soon adapted a new format for the cards—4 inches wide, 6 inches high, folded once, and inserted in an envelope.” This book-like shape is still the one greeting cards are sold in.

The cards were important cultural markers in the way that they focused more on the celebratory aspect of Christmas, than the religious. The V&A website says, “In his book The History of the Christmas Card (1954), collector George Buday suggested that, “the Christmas card from its beginning was more closely associated in the minds of the senders with the social aspect – the festivities connected with Christmas than with the religious function of the season”…”