Why do you send cards at Christmas?

Christmas is here and it's time to send greeting cards again. Has anyone ever wondered where these beautiful Christmas cards, come from?

The birth of the Christmas card

People from different cultures around the world have been sending handwritten New Year's cards to each other for centuries. However, the sending of cards by English-speaking people can only be traced back to the mid-19th century. Some evidence suggests that the tradition first began in the 1840s with Thomas Shorrock of Leith, Scotland. He produced this card with a smiley face and the caption 'A Guid New Year Tae Ye'.

However, it is Sir Henry Cole, the first director of the Victoria Museum in London, who is more commonly credited with the creation of Christmas cards, and who in 1843 had an artist create 1,000 engraved Christmas cards. Sir Cole's card shows a prosperous family toasting the festive season; to the left and right of the card are decorated with pictures of good people doing good deeds. At the bottom of the card there is a caption: 'Merry Christmas and New Year'.

With advances in printing technology and mail services, mass-printed Christmas cards appeared. By the 1880s, these Christmas cards had become part of the Christmas season in American homes. Micaela di Leonardo, an anthropologist at Yale University and author of Cards and the Feminine World of the Holidays: Women, Family and Kinship, explains that this commercial practice emerged with the advance of industrialisation and the demise of the family farm after the Civil War. When relatives were scattered, women were considered responsible for 'keeping kinship alive' and thus became the guardians of loose family ties. Christmas cards were a convenient tool for them to maintain their relationships with their husbands, children and distant relatives.

As the habit of sending Christmas cards to each other took hold, manufacturers began to compete for the market. One of the most famous of these was Louis Prang, a German immigrant, whose colour lithograph cards were so inexpensive that he captured a large share of the market. He is often referred to as the 'father of the American Christmas card'.

In 1885, the magazine Decorating and Arranging criticised the misuse of pictures such as the 'Maiden in Trousers Singing in the Snow' and the 'Angel with Baby on the Wind'. The article commented that these annoying images were not at all cheerful.

Another problem faced by greeting card manufacturers was the poor production of greeting cards. Also in 1885, Art Enthusiast magazine commented that the cherub in one of the British maker's cards was "too transparently printed, even for an empty soul, in the connection of her head with her body."

Industry critics predicted that the American public would soon tire of Christmas cards. But in the early 1900s, the market was brought back into the spotlight by improvements in image copying technology, and in 1900, an article in the British Medical Journal praised a new series of Christmas cards that used 'platinum plate copying' techniques so realistic that they almost looked like photocopies. There was also an increase in the number of themes on the new cards - including sporting themes, landscapes and patriotic paintings depicting uniformed soldiers.

As printing techniques improved further, the production of Christmas cards became an increasingly lucrative but competitive business venture. By the end of the 1920s, the industry boasted 40 Christmas card factories employing over 5,000 American workers. Each year each factory paid artists to design new cards and kept them under wraps to prevent competitors from copying them.

With so much money already invested, the sales strategy of the industry became even more important and in 1928 Samuel Grafton of the North American Review described how, when the Christmas season came, teams "worked around the clock to try to popularise the little pieces of paper that were beautifully etched and used to express goodwill ". Their mission was to convince people that the next-newer versions were obsolete and to "make you feel like you're a mad yellow badass if you don't spend $7 every December on some of these little cards that come together with glue-ink paper." Grafton refers to consumers being "submissive like sheep" and allowing themselves to be dutifully lulled into the trap set by the Christmas card industry.

While Grafton joins other critics in criticising the inappropriate commercialisation of the holiday season, consumers are getting a strong sense of the festive season and the accompanying Christmas cards.