Christmas is just around the corner and with the start of December comes the putting up of festive lights and trees and the tradition of sending Christmas cards to friends and family both near and far.
In an age of instant messaging, email and FaceTime, when those you love are often just a touchscreen phone call or text away, you may think that the tradition of sending cards is becoming somewhat redundant – but not so for us Brits.
Some recent figures for the UK card market show that it’s worth a whopping £1.7bn, with Christmas greetings making up nearly half of that sizeable figure.
What is more, the Greetings Card Association estimates that around £50m is raised for worthwhile causes every year, thanks to the sales of charity Christmas cards.
So where did the tradition of sending Christmas cards start and when was the first festive greeting sent by mail?
When was the first Christmas card sent?
The very first Christmas card was sent in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole.
Sir Henry Cole was the chief organiser of the Great Exhibition, pioneer of the Uniform Penny Post and also the founder of the V&A Museum.
The V&A records that Cole’s diary entry for 17 December 1843 reads: ‘In the Evg Horsley came & brought his design for Christmas Cards.’
This refers to artist John Callcott Horsley, who was commissioned by Cole to design the very first Christmas card. His illustration featured three generations of the Cole family all raising a toast alongside the words ‘A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year To You.’
One of these original Christmas cards was sold by Bonhams auction house in London in 2005 for £4,700.
Cole sent the cards he had designed that year to his associates, friends and relatives, but he also had the design published and offered for sale for the price of a shilling.
The card didn’t sell well and the tradition of sending Christmas cards didn’t truly catch on until about twenty years later, in the 1860s, when new printing processes and Prince Albert’s introduction of various German Christmas traditions into British culture made for a more viable market and demand for Christmas cards rose.
The V&A museum has collected and displayed greetings cards ever since it was established thanks to its association with Cole and to date has over 30,000 cards archived – more than half of which are Christmas cards.
According to the V&A, the Victorians well and truly cemented the tradition of sending Christmas cards and were also responsible for establishing ‘the now familiar iconography of Christmas.’
‘This period saw the debut of many of the meaningful symbols and decorative devices that we associate with the festive season,’ the V&A explains.
‘Winter scenes of robins, holly, evergreens, country churches and snowy landscapes; along with indoor scenes of seasonal rituals and gift giving, from decorating trees and Christmas dinner, to Santa Claus, children’s games, pantomime characters and Christmas crackers – another Victorian invention.’
Much like our Victorian ancestors, Brits still love to send Christmas cards today and the GCA Market Report in 2018 showed that one billion Christmas cards were sold in the UK in 2017 alone.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/04/first-christmas-card-sent-sir-henry-cole-11267319/
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