The fascinating story of the first ever Christmas card

Now that it’s officially the Christmas week, let us ask you something. Do you plan to send cards this Christmas to your family and friends? Well, that would be wonderful! After all, a Christmas greeting card can be the ideal way to remind your loved ones that even though you may not meet them in person, they are always in your heart.  

Now, this brings us to today’s question: Who do you think came up with the idea of a Christmas card and how old is the tradition? Let us find out! 

World meets the first Christmas card 
The year was 1843 and the British postal system had just introduced the “Penny Post”. The aim was to enable people to send a letter or a card by speed post anywhere in the country by affixing a penny stamp to the correspondence. But this brand-new system made the life of distinguished British educator and patron of arts, Sir Henry Cole, quite difficult. Why? Because he was part of England’s elite social circles (including the royal family) and had too many acquaintances who chose the holiday season to send him letters containing Christmas and New Year greetings from all across the country. This meant that Cole had to respond to each letter individually, something that was taking up all his time. Well, not answering mail was considered impolite in Victorian England.   

Now this man is best remembered today as the founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum of London was an avid supporter of the new postal system. So, he couldn’t stop the services either. But he was also a busy man and was desperate to find an easy way out. Guess what he did! He commissioned an artist friend named J.C. Horsley for designing something that he had conceived in his mind. It was an illustration of a family’s three generations celebrating Christmas at the dinner table inside a house, while others outside were busy helping out the poor (depicting the “feed the hungry” and “cloth the naked” themes). This was made into a triptych (a series of images on side-by-side tablets, connected by hinges) and soon a thousand copies were printed. They also contained a message reading “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You” and had a “To ____” section at the top for Cole to personalise each. This ingenious idea not only saved Sir Cole’s valuable time but also gifted the world with the first ever Christmas card. Interestingly, Cole was unable to use up all the cards for himself and sold the rest for a shilling under the pseudonym Felix Summerly. 

But if historical records are to be believed, long before Cole came up with Christmas card, German alchemist Michael Maier had sent out the first Christmas card to James I of England in 1611. The card contained birthday wishes for the King that coincided with the joyous occasion of Christmas. 

Christmas card becomes a global tradition 
It may have been Sir Cole and his circle of friends who were sending out the first batch of Christmas cards, but it wasn’t until Queen Victoria wanted to recreate it that the people of England really embraced it. Her inspiration was of course Sir Cole’s idea 

Later, in 1875, a Prussian immigrant named Louis Prang, who set up a printing shop in Boston, introduced the idea of Christmas card in the USA. But unlike Cole’s version, this had no Christmassy theme to it, but simply a picture of a flower with the message “Merry Christmas.” Yet, it took another 40 years to make Christmas card a prominent part of global Christmas tradition. It was all thanks to the American printer Joyce Hall’s Kansas-based postcard making company that printed the first commercial batch of Christmas cards with a 4 by 6 dimension, folded once and put inside an envelope. The speciality was that it had various sorts of Christmas images as well as messages, yet had sufficient blank space for senders to jot down their own personal notes.