History of the Christmas Card

People used to exhange handwritten holiday greetings. They first gave them in person then by mail. By 1822, homemade Christmas cards were becoming the bane of the U.S. postal system. That very year, Superintendent of Mails in Washington, D.C. complained that he would need to hire 16 extra mail carriers. He petitioned Congress to limit the exchange of cards by post, concluding, "I don't know what we'll do if it keeps on."

Well...it kept on!

The sending of commercially printed Christmas cards originated in London in 1843.

With the marketing of attractive commercial cards the postal burden worsened. The first Christmas card designed for sale was by London artist John Calcott Horsley.

A respected illustrator of the day, Horsley was commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, a wealthy British businessman, who wanted a card he could proudly send to friends and professional acquaintances to wish them a "merry Christmas."

The first Christmas card's inscription read: "merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you." "Merry" was then a spiritual word meaning "blessed," as in "merry old England."

Of the original one thousand cards printed for Henry Cole, twelve exist today in private collections.

Printed cards soon became the rage in England; then in Germany. But it required an additional thirty years for Americans to take to the idea. In 1875, Boston lithographer Louis Prang, a native of Germany, began publishing cards, and earned the title "father of the American Christmas card."

Prang's high-quality cards were quite costly, and they initially featured not such images as the Madonna and Child, a decorated tree, or even Santa Claus, but colored floral arrangements of roses, daisies, gardenias, geraniums, and apple blossoms.

Americans took to Christmas cards, but not to Prang's; he was forced out of business in 1890. It was cheap penny Christmas postcards imported from Germany that remained the vogue until World War 1. By war's end, America's modern greeting card industry had been born.

Photo is of a 1967 Christmas card...

Today more than two billion Christmas cards are exchanged each year. And that's just in the United States. Christmas is the number one card-selling holiday of the year. Now that's a lot of cards!